Spike is a magazine for cultural criticism and unconventional ideas, mixing writing on themes urgent and forever unresolved, from “Web3” and “After Beauty” to “Plants” and “Patriarchy.” Spike is visually splashy, by turns pushy, poetic, unexpected – and not shy to start an argument. Featuring literary luminaries like Nicolas Bourriaud, Jamieson Webster, Dean Kissick, McKenzie Wark, Joanna Walsh, and Jeppe Ugelvig, Spike has enjoyed a profound impact on art and its discourse in Europe and North America for two decades and counting.

As a print quarterly, a digital broadside, and an event space, Spike offers a soapbox to cultural critics and literary essayists to chronicle our time in thought. Founded in 2004 and still published by the artist Rita Vitorelli, Spike is one of the last remaining independent art magazines.

Spike has a broad distribution in Europe, the United States, and Asia. With its complete archive in a fully browsable format and completely searchable text, the magazine is now digitally available for readers, libraries, art schools, and experts all over the world.

A digital subscription gives you access to the complete online archive of Spike Art Magazine since issue one, Autumn 2004 – that's 20 years, and 15.000 pages. 

A sense of major flux is spreading in the art world – and not only among its pessimists. Under pressure from reactionary politics and its own “now more than ever” imperatives, so much in art is changing: criticism into a flashy rubber stamp; art schools into trauma industries; fairs into 3D-PDFs; museums into everything for everybody; and art-making into a moral protocol. Some artists are responding by dropping out, going Web3, or protesting genocide; a few are launching their own galleries or wellness brands; plenty are still just painting painting painting.

Spike #80 – The State of the Arts is dropping a pin so that the next time we go off road, we can find a way back to our last clear perspective – a bit jaded, a little dizzy, but faithful as ever that artists are finding our way forward.

With an essay by Travis Diehl on riskless art; Domenick Ammirati on getting ahead by getting hot; Anna Kornbluh on culture as pure vibe; Daniel Baumann on the impossibility of succeeding as a curator; an interview with painter and gallerist Jamian Juliano-Villani; Aodhan Madden on the trash girl art of Maggie Lee, Ser Serpas & K8 Hardy; Jaakko Pallasvuo and Kristian Vistrup Madsen talk trying (and failing) to drop out of the art world; a guide to decentralized social media; Marina Abramović’s secret to longevity; a postcard from Riyadh; Nicolas Bourriaud on this year’s Venice Biennale; and so much more.