Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE LOVELIEST TRICK OF THE DEVIL
For his closing column on Spike, Dean Kissick wonders if the last six years have indeed been spiraling downward – and what’s to come next. Balenciaga rejects outrage, Kanye is a Nazi, everyone is a satanist, the color of the year is primordial invocation of joy, Donald Trump and Alex Jones are voices of reason. It’s either the end of doom, or a whole new era of worse-still derangement.
19 / 1 / 2023
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: NEW YORK’S 2022 FALL SHOWS
In this month’s installment of “The Downward Spiral,” Dean Kissick writes a roundup of New York’s fall exhibitions. They are many, so many, and pleasant, so pleasant, as palliatives for a doomed dying world.
21 / 11 / 2022
by Dean Kissick
Essay / DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE REHEARSAL
22 / 10 / 2022
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: TEXT-TO-IMAGE
In this month’s installment of “The Downward Spiral,” Dean Kissick reflects on the literary nature of AI-generated images.
15 / 8 / 2022
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: TASTE, FIGURES, IMAGES
Some years ago, I went out with some friends to Trisha’s, a basement bar in Soho in London, and after a few drinks a stylist, quite austere, softly spoken, leant over to me and asked quietly, “Do all the bad designers, know that they’re bad?” That’s a question I’ve often wondered myself. And today it’s so hard to tell the difference, and the boundaries between good and bad have disappeared.
15 / 7 / 2022
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: 59TH VENICE BIENNALE
Is the 59th Venice Biennale the final chapter of an exhausted story? In his May column, Dean Kissick ponders how identity became the biggest elephant in the rooms of mega exhibitions, and how to abandon our screens for the real world and the real world for dreams.
3 / 6 / 2022
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: EUROPE
Dean Kissick corresponds with two young arts workers from Ukraine – Kateryna Tykhonenko and Valeria Schiller – who share firsthand accounts of the war that is currently unfolding.
10 / 5 / 2022
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: NEW EARTH 3
(Slovenčina) Dead Kissick tentoraz prináša podobenstvo alebo proroctvo.
10 / 5 / 2022
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: FIVE YEARS
With nostalgia taking hold at The New Museum Triennial and MoMA PS1’s survey of Greater New York, Dean Kissick wonders: what’s so great about it? When art gets sucked back into tradition, where is the future to be found?
28 / 12 / 2021
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: PERSONA (PART I)
Are we human, or are we content? Dean Kissick ponders Demna Gvasalia, Donda, the cult of celebrity, and the actual occult in this month’s Downward Spiral.
30 / 10 / 2021
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: LEAVE SOCIETY
Dean Kissick returns from his summer hiatus (ascetic, solitary research, perhaps?), restored and brimming with renewed hope. Eat vegetables, get Tao Lin-pilled, and revel in the beauty of the universe: the modern-day equivalent of "turn on, tune in, drop out"?
2 / 8 / 2021
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE ART PARTY CAROUSEL
This May, Dean goes to Frieze, rolls his eyes at the Turner Prize shortlist, and sees New York opening up again.
20 / 5 / 2021
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: RETURN TO TRADITION
Dean Kissick goes to the Frick Madison on a beautiful spring day.
28 / 4 / 2021
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: POPULAR THINGS
You can run but you can’t hide. Dean Kissick on NFTs and the pervasiveness of mundane art.
26 / 3 / 2021
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: ANIMALS
For his first column of the new year, Dean Kissick finds solace and good omens in ornithology. The future looks not altogether unpromising.
22 / 2 / 2021
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: 2020
DEAN KISSICK reviews a long year.
29 / 12 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: CENTRIST DAD OUROBOROS
A lot’s changed in New York since we last heard from Dean in October. A president was elected and fresh plywood added to store façades, quickly blanketed in new graffiti hearts. Hope and the 5G conspiracy are pretty tricky things.
30 / 11 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: ZOMBIE FIGURATION AND THE DEATH RITUAL
It’s fall so Dean goes on a gallery tour of Manhattan.
29 / 10 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: FALL
DEAN’s latest column is an ode to the coming fall, where New York is struggles to bring normalcy back into play. But when was New York ever normal?
30 / 9 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: AS I READ THE DECADE BRAIN
Dean takes us through the troubled beginnings of the 2020s, charting his own history in New York, and the timeline of events of the previous decade that brought us here. Writing is the best cure for amnesia.
26 / 8 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: MAY DAYS
DEAN KISSICK was in New York when America rose up, and managed to both document and celebrate the protests that followed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by the police.
11 / 7 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: LITTLE PATCH OF YELLOW WALL
DEAN KISSICK is in search of lost rays of the sun, in paintings. There is a certain kind of light, and it still seems to show on Proust, Vermeer, and kitties?
27 / 6 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE COUNTRYSIDE
The countryside is synonymous with the desires for escape, health, self-sustainability, and many other things that might well describe the current mood under the threat of corona. DEAN KISSICK weighs in on one exhibition that presents the nether reaches as just that: somewhere far away.
5 / 5 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: MANHATTAN
DEAN KISSICK writes from New York and the heart of the global pandemic. Nothing Dean or any of his friends say is medical advice.
26 / 4 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: TWENTIES JOY
With the dawn of a new decade comes the possibility that all could start over, be good again. Why not? Dean Kissick takes us on a journey in search of exhiliration in art, theatre, and elsewhere. Follow his trek from Mexico to New York, out of the glum and into glam and glee.
25 / 3 / 2020
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE DOWNWARD BANANA
30 / 12 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE REAL WORLD
Dean reads Natasha Stagg’s new essay collection Sleeveless and Fiona Duncan’s debut novel Exquisite Mariposa and begins to understand the 2010s.
28 / 11 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE TALENTED MR. GUWOP
Gucci’s new Cruise campaign, directed by Harmony Korine and Alessandro Michele, stars rapper Gucci Mane. Gucci Mane’s new album cover, shot by Harmony Korine and Alessandro Michele, stars Gucci. Pop continues to eat itself. Nothing means anything here, in the twilight of the 2010s.
27 / 10 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL
Dean swims in the magic river. There’s a death on the island. And a visitor sails into the harbour.
21 / 10 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL
(Slovenčina) Dean Kissick sa venuje embryonickým ľudoopím chiméram, ktoré stvorili genetici v Kalifornii. Je na čase sa znovu zamyslieť nad tým, čím by sme ešte mohli byť.
29 / 8 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: A PHILOSOPHER’S BOAT IN SKJOLDEN
This month Dean Kissick goes to the Norwegian countryside, contemplates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s retreat from society and sees art’s return to its pagan origins in artist Marianne Heske’s latest project.
24 / 7 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: PARADISE BY DIMES SQUARE
A love letter to Montez Press Radio from Dean Kissick.
30 / 6 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE EUPHORIC CONSPIRACY
We’re all writing stories together now. Dean Kissick swims through the conspiracy theories surrounding Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi.
26 / 4 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: SHARJAH
This month, Dean Kissick went to the United Arab Emirates to visit Sharjah Biennial 14.
27 / 3 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: NOT SO MUCH HORNY AS FULL OF DESPAIR
This month, Dean Kissick investigates what’s going on in Goshen, New York.
22 / 2 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: PEARL RIVER DIARY
Dean visits the sixth Guangzhou Triennial, “As We May Think: Feedforward”, curated by Angelique Spaninks, Zhang Ga and Philipp Ziegler.
30 / 1 / 2019
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE WORLD’S A STAGE
What has Dean learnt from the greatest city in the world?
17 / 12 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL
12 / 11 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: PORTLAND
Dean Kissick visits Portland, Oregon for the Utopian Visions Art Fair
11 / 10 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: MY STRUGGLE
Dean Kissick reads Karl Ove Knausgård’s 1,153-page literary suicide note The End: My Struggle Book 6
9 / 9 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE CHINA CHALET GROUP
In this month's column Dean Kissick goes to a three-quarter-scale replica of an art bar in a gallery.
20 / 8 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: FRIEZE DIARY
For Frieze New York Spike columnist Dean Kissick didn't look at any art. Instead he drank with strangers to gauge the mood of the city.
20 / 5 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE MELDING OF FASHION AND POLITICS
In his column Dean Kissick writes about fashion predicting the future and why today's political technologists are much like Parisian designers.
27 / 4 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: THE MIRROR IN THE PALACE
In his column Dean Kissick writes about Neïl Beloufa's controversial show "L'Ennemi de mon ennemi" at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. What does it tell us about protest in our "byzantine circulatory system of images"?
26 / 3 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: CRYPTOCURRENCY AND MADNESS
In his first column of 2018 Dean Kissick writes about going crazy for crypto. How did the blockchain's promise of immutable truth turn into an opaque cultural spectacle?
26 / 2 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #11
In his column Dean Kissick writes about the second season of the BBC's Blue Planet and finds a swansong for a disappearing natural world full of bizarre beauty. As it retreats into the past and becomes material for historians, science and technology may furnish us with an imaginary and perhaps still stranger world.
17 / 1 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #10
We are on the edge of the abyss, but nobody seems to really care. In his latest column Dean Kissick writes about how the present threat of a nuclear war gets lost in the memeification of reality and politics.
2 / 1 / 2018
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #9
Will Ivanka Trump Save Us from Hell? Dean Kissick examines the culture of a collapsing society.
26 / 12 / 2017
by Dean Kissick
THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #8
This has been a year of disappearing statues, but what will become of all the defaced idols and broken images? Dean Kissick writes about why iconoclasm is back and what we can do about its aftermath.
11 / 12 / 2017
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #7
Dean Kissick writes about what happens when subcultures emerge from the underbelly of the internet, Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies, and how the culture wars of the 90s have come back to haunt us.
3 / 12 / 2017
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #6
In his column Dean Kissick writes about Sophia, the first robot to be granted citizenship by a country. But as a female humanoid robot, she says more about humans' lack of imagination than the new forms and relationships that lie ahead of us.
28 / 11 / 2017
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #5
In this month's column, Dean Kissick joins the dots between a runaway dog and shy peacocks in his diary of the preview days of documenta 14 in Kassel and Skulptur Projekte Münster.
20 / 6 / 2017
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #4
The Summer of Love turns 50 this year, and we are still feeling its effects: In his latest column, Dean Kissick explains how a society more atomised than ever grew out of the ruins of the Bay Area counterculture.
27 / 5 / 2017
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL: DOCUMENTA 14
In this month’s column, Dean Kissick shares his diary of four days in Athens during the preview days of documenta 14.
15 / 5 / 2017
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #2
In this month’s column, Dean Kissick looks at Superflat America, the rise of hikikomori and their connections to alt-right meme culture.
29 / 4 / 2017
by Dean Kissick
Essay / THE DOWNWARD SPIRAL #1
In this month’s column, Dean Kissick considers Richard Prince's disavowal of his artwork and the destabilisation of reality.
25 / 4 / 2017
by Dean Kissick
Essay / RADICAL CELEBRITY
15 / 3 / 2017
by Dean Kissick