Spike Art Magazine

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. 

What does it mean to do culture Post-Cool? Getting to clarity about our unfolding now, it begins with refusing the exhausted detachment of crisis-thinking to simply try something new. 

SPIKE IS CELEBRATING 20 YEARS of bringing this same generosity to art with a special double issue. Cultural protagonists in Berlin, Vienna, and New York piece together momentous changes in Spike’s home cities, while founding publisher Rita Vitorelli narrates running the mag as an artist to Dean Kissick, underscored by reprints of seminal essays by the likes of Chris Kraus and Bruce Hainley. Further highlights are Taylor Swift as a millennial paracetamol; Silicon Valley optimizing the body for forever; video games as escapeways back into reality; and white-cube presentations of handicrafts, slot machines, and the choreographic turn. 

Plus! A poster of art’s most defining moments since 2004.