Artists Space

Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop
by J. Hoberman

Book Launch
June 6, 2025, 7pm

Please join us for a book launch celebrating the release of Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop by acclaimed author and film critic, J. Hoberman.

Comparable to Paris in the 1920s, 1960s New York City was a cauldron of avant-garde ferment and artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. In Everything Is Now Hoberman presents a groundbreaking history of New York City cultural life. Drawing largely on first-hand reporting, published memoirs, online oral histories and interviews, Hoberman digs into this collective drama as it was played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters and ultimately the streets.

Book cover featuring yellow and white text on a black background, and a black-and-white photograph. The text reads "Everything Is Now / The 1960s New York Avant-Garde— / Primal Happenings, / Underground Movies, / Radical Pop / J. Hoberman."
Cover of Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop, Verso, 2025. [Book cover featuring yellow and white text on a black background, and a black-and-white photograph. The text reads "Everything Is Now / The 1960s New York Avant-Garde— / Primal Happenings, / Underground Movies, / Radical Pop / J. Hoberman."]

The principal characters are the penniless filmmakers, jazz musicians, performing poets, as well as less classifiable and hyphenate artists. Most were outsiders and consequently, these artists often clashed with the police, the courts, the law, and authority in general. By the mid-’60s various artistic subcultures coalesced into an entire counterculture that overlapped the struggle for civil rights, the peace and anti-war movements, Black nationalism, women’s and gay liberation, the campaign for sexual freedom and the legal assault on censorship, as well as forms of direct-action anarchy.

At its heart, Everything Is Now is a tribute to those who wrote for the alternative weeklies as well as other cultural reporters. It is through their eyes that we might know how new work, alarming or exhilarating or both, was received.

J. Hoberman was for over three decades a film and culture critic for The Village Voice. His previous books have explored the subculture of midnight movies, the rise and fall of Yiddish-language cinema, the international Communist avantgarde, SoHo performance art, and the underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His “found illusions” trilogy—which includes The Dream Life, Make My Day, and An Army of Phantoms—used Hollywood to refract the history of the Cold War.

Artists Space Venue is generously supported by Stephen Cheng, Allan Schwartzman, and David Zwirner.