Spike #85

For Autumn 2025, Spike is cutting through the déjà vu aura around contemporary culture. 

Are we doomed to ever-shorter cycles of cash-cow retromania, until AI memory-wipes us with pure simulation? Or is the root problem of our anti-sentimentality actually the expectation that art “make it new,” itself just so much nostalgia for a long-gone modernism? We’re working out what the present owes to the past, if our goal is to conjure a better culture for tomorrow.

Featuring Jeppe Ugelvig’s essay on the art world’s uses and misuses of nostalgia; Simon Reynolds and Adina Glickstein talk exhausting the past; e-girl/theorist Alex Quicho critiques the end of newness; Artist’s Favorites by Diego Marcon; filmmaker Johan Grimonprez identifies with the hijacker in his documentary dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997); art historian Lynn Zelevansky on “New York/New Wave” at P.S.1 Contemporary (1981); Sean Monahan forecasts our old-fashioned future; image contributions by Megan Plunkett, Len Schweder, Cora Pongracz, Paul Niedermayer, and Ken Kagami; Martin Herbert’s portrait of kitsch-savant artist Friedrich Kunath; Aodhan Madden on Marc Kokopeli, Bedros Yeretzian, Flora Hauser, and Nicole-Antonia Spagnola making analog-ish art “under” the internet; cultural critic Rosanna McLaughlin on missing the white cube; ex-dealers Margaret Lee and Jeff Poe talk escaping the art game whole; Whitney Mallett on rebranding celebrity through book culture; artist Maja Bajevic’s Yugostalgic report from Sarajevo; Tea Hačić-Vlahović getting dewy-eyed catching up to her mother’s age; plus, reviews of exhibitions by Mark Leckey, Wolfgang Tillmans, Women’s History Museum, and more!