Spike / 76

ISSUE 76 (SUMMER 2023): AN ARTIST'S LIFE

 

Spike #76 is dedicated to the artist. From the ultracontemporaries to those whose success came too late to be enjoyed, this issue is about aging, enduring, and surviving death, in their works as much as their stories. How can an artist emerge in our oceanic present, faced with the internet’s image infinity, a penetrating market, and ever murkier prospects? And why, having emerged, do some artists fail – what kills their careers? Barry Schwabsky looks at early periods versus late styles, Cindy Sherman talks about abstracting getting older, and Lauren Elkin suggests a way out of the snares of biography by re-centering art itself. 

 

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Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike is a bilingual English/German contemporary art magazine, online platform and event space. The flagship print magazine Spike Art Quarterly is aimed at sustaining a vigorous, independent and meaningful art criticism. Essays by leading critics and curators are complemented by other formats offering room for polemics, meditations, and short answers to urgent questions. Published four times a year, Spike offers its readers both intimacy and immediacy through an unusually open editorial approach that is not afraid of controversy and provocation.