"Founded by the artist Rita Vitorelli in 2004, Spike is a 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. The event space Spike Berlin has become known for heated round-table discussions and high-profile talks, while Spike Online features up-to-the-minute reports, interviews, and photo essays from around the world." (from website)
“There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher said in 1987. The dismantling of the welfare state, careerism, selfishness and lobby renovations. A rabid free-for-all for those with something; a big betrayal for those who would be left with nothing. It ushered in the political predicament we are still mired in today. But there was also a growing sense of community. In England workers took to the streets, in New York there were protests against the cynicism of the government’s response to the AIDS crisis. And for part of the art world, political collective engagement was more important than the market. This issue is about the 80s.
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