Everything Is Now

New York in the 1960s was to America what Paris had been in the 1920s: a cauldron of avant-garde experiment where artists broke boundaries and invented new forms. In Everything Is Now, J. Hoberman, the long-time writer on art and film, tells the story of how that ferment unfolded and where it spilled out.

The book is built from interviews, memoirs and the alternative press. It follows the decade's creative upheaval through the places where it happened: coffeehouses, bars, lofts and storefront theaters, and eventually the streets themselves. The cast includes Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann and Andy Warhol, along with many others.

Their work grew out of the debris and electricity of city life, and it was confrontational and determined to break taboos. Hoberman shows how these scattered subcultures gradually merged into a counterculture, one that reshaped New York, the country and, in time, the wider world.