When even sitting around in a park is haunted by the feeling of being permanently logged on, it falls to art to imagine new aesthetics, fables, values, and protocols.

Kids these days: how are they keeping on, as hypermediation threatens to glitch out the future? As it turns out, by doing what youth has always done: finding profound meaning in the most unexpected pl...

Under her direction since 2021, living up to first principles at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, colloquially the MAK, begins with knowing where the present is.

No title, no theme, no didacticism, plenty of kids and pets: the 2026 Whitney Biennial narrows its gaze as the world comes apart. Is this conflict-avoidance – or a subtle politics of fragility?

The designer behind Civilization, the new-look Interview, and the rollout of Rosalía’s latest album on the state of images and the untiring (ir)reason of magazines.

If humanity can’t see a shrink about the climate crisis, what can art offer in shaking us awake? An artist known for deeply troubling what constitutes “Nature” muses from the KunstHausWien.

At a playful exhibition at Konschthal Esch, Luxembourg, the new media artist calls for letting meaning grow slowly in the viewer – and teases the notion of collecting a video 1000 years long.

Reimagining one’s gay self in pattern mash-ups from Op Art and AbEx to graffiti, Richard Hawkins’s Kunsthalle Wien exhibition frames painting as freedom quest – and an earthly pleasure besides.

Among dozens of his canvases at Kunsthalle Krems, the New York painter muses on finding one’s footing as a young artist when the world seems full of cons.

Memes-for-clothes and post-robotic aesthetics, DeepDream politics and fads that burned too hot, too fast – here Spike’s flashbulb views on another cracked year in culture.

Unlike the apocalypse films of yesteryear, in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia and Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, crises don’t breed heroes – just additional villains.

Long reserved for Germany’s next big thing in contemporary art, the awarding of the Preis der Nationalgalerie to the starry artist-entrepreneur is a sign of grim times to come.

The filmmaker’s latest work, screened at Berlinale 2025 and the Kyiv Biennial in Warsaw, is a rupture in the West’s post-War history of the Arab, the Jew, and the European.

The great-granddaughter of a Jewish Austrian collector returned to Salzburg to ask: What can we really expect of restitution?

For Allhallowtide, Spike’s digital editor visited the capital of European esoterism, taking in art’s imps, gore, incorruptible flesh – and even spooky action at a distance.

What keeps a critic going through Paris Internationale, Art Basel Paris, and a dozen exhibitions besides? Imagining the whole shebang happening in flip flops – plus a drop of culturally “useless” dew.

A hit novelist chases legitimacy through her dead editor – possibly reincarnated as a rat. Sharp, surreal, and merciless about ambition's psychic costs, the novel skewers the publishing world.

In her new philosophical history of the internet, Spike’s contributor and former columnist examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.

In New York, an art-duo-cum-label’s send-up of the working class women of Belle Époque France is scrappy, romantic, ferally alive.

At once titillating and encyclopedic, an exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg revisits the collapse of European socialism through the image economy of sex.

AI is co-spawning a visual culture beyond any imagination. Will an overthrow of good taste re-vest pictures with their mysterious power? Or are we chasing our machines into pastiche hell?

Ever-prescient, the multimedia artist and filmmaker’s new memoir crystallizes the extensions of the self unique to art.

By turns complimentary and combative, two leading lights of “post-internet cinema” talk out art’s responsibility to stay with the times, no matter how strange.

In Vienna, a former sex worker’s mash-up of broke pop, bad taste, and low-res funk beckons the outsider – and can be extremely slippery.

The new artistic co-director of Tanzquartier Wien envisions dance as a practice of hospitality – with Vienna’s many publics as her guests.

By turns militant, paranoiac, and deeply satirical, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film stages an opposition to US fascism beyond screenshotting tweets.

In Paris, a library overflows with the alt-iconographic displays that made the photographer synonymous with visual culture’s last new normal.

What good is cut-rate, lookalike luxury if it can only be worn onscreen?

A Berlin Biennale more intent on crisis management than exhibition-making raises the question: Does the biennial format – and Berlin itself – still deliver?

The British artist and the founder of PAN records harmonize on brands and arcana, waste and subculture, and music’s animalistic approach towards the future.

Zoe Dubno’s debut novel, Happiness and Love, is a one-night pan of the art world’s obsessions with surfaces and being seen.

What can Pop possibly mean when the commodity has been overwhelmed by content? A view from dual shows by Laila Shawa and Esben Weile Kjær at the Salzburger Kunstverein.

“Global refuge.” “Cosmopolitan nowhere.” Under a regime of rent hikes, right-wing politics, and violent censorship, what is becoming of a city whose image long amounted to artistic freedom?

In the New York author’s new novel, the media-core melodrama Little Pink Book, abuse of language comes as a so very sweet surprise.

The artist, filmmaker, and author of Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat grapples with magical thinking, implication in military-industrial AI, and machine learning’s many roads not taken.