Everything Is Now

The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop

By: J Hoberman

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eBook | 27 May 2025

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Like Paris in the 1920s, New York City in the 1960s was a cauldron of avant-garde ferment and artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and the alternative press, Everything Is Now chron?icles this collective drama as it was played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters, and, ultimately, the streets.

The principals here are penniless filmmak?ers, jazz musicians, and performing poets, as well as less classifiable artists. Most were outsiders at the time. They include Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and many more. Some were associ?ated with specific movements (Avant Rock, Destruction Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Happenings, Mimeographed Zines, Pop Art, Protest-Folk, Ridiculous Theater, Stand-Up Poetry, Underground Comix, and Underground Movies). But there were also movements of one. Their art, rooted in the detritus and excitement of urban life, was taboo-breaking and confrontational.

As J. Hoberman shows in this riveting his?tory, these subcultures coalesced into a counterculture that changed the city, the country, and the world.