Everything Is Now

Praise

“A fast-paced ride”
—Best Art Books 2025, Christies

“Nobody in America writes as well about culture and film as J. Hoberman”
—Peter Biskind, author of Down and Dirty Pictures and Pandora’s Box

“The dish, plus the mentions of virtually every downtown address where people lived and worked, gives a vivid sense of the ’60s avant-garde as a physically and personally close-knit group and the art they created as a collective enterprise. Minutely detailed descriptions of movies, plays, concerts, and “happenings,” from underground classics (the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now) to the truly obscure (Barbara Rubin’s multimedia event, Caterpillar Changes), also make palpable the period’s anything-goes ethos.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“A striking countercultural history of New York City. [Everything is Now] is a thrilling conjuration of a head-spinningly innovative time and place.”
—starred review, Publishers Weekly

“Everything Is Now is a propulsive account of New York’s counterculture in the 1960s. It’s all documented by legendary cultural critic J. Hoberman, whose authoritative and evocative writing welcomes readers into the city’s exclusive art-world circles as guests rather than outside observers. It makes for a compelling, dishy read that’s also deeply researched.”
—A.V. Club

“Back in the 1960s, New York City was a haven for the avant-garde, whether it was in the shape of subcultural movements like fluxus and guerrilla theater or venues like coffeehouses, bars, and lofts. Hoberman’s cultural history is a thorough account of the New York underground, complete with rich, minute details about what the city once was.”
—The Millions

“We look to history to chart the future. I came to this basic reaffirmation while reading J. Hoberman’s latest, addicting, grand cultural history, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. The snake of a title promises a lot to chew on—and the book delivers…With the final line of the book, Hoberman hauntingly clarifies what he has written: ‘a memoir, although not mine.'”
—Carlos Valladares, Art in America

“J. Hoberman is one of our best and most prescient cultural critics – and after a dozen or so books, his latest, Everything is Now – stands as his magnum opus. Epic in scope, it is a vast New York-centric taxonomy and throw-down of arcana to rival the Mentaculus.”
—Gary Lucas, The Forward

“Hoberman, a veteran culture critic, takes an in-depth look at the ‘60s New York arts scene — including Beat poets, experimental filmmakers and guerrilla theater — and how its rebel spirit spread throughout the country and the world. The book is also a reminder of a time when art truly mattered and definitively shaped the culture at large in New York and beyond.”
—Chris Vognar, Los Angeles Times

“J. Hoberman, for years the reigning film critic at the Village Voice, might be the Siegfried Kracauer of the 21st century. Plus, he’s more entertaining.”
—Counterpunch

“The book offers a roll call of those artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers, photogs, writers, playwrights, and uncatagorizables who shook off the gray conformity of the Eisenhower years for the riotous spectrum of the Sixties…Hoberman has gathered them, and literally hundreds more, to help make sense of it all now.”
—The Village Voice

“The book is in conversation with Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974), with its subject, the notorious New York public official Robert Moses, something of a recurring villain here. Space is given to how artists reacted to Moses’s absurd plan to carve an expressway through Lower Manhattan and the Moses-overseen 1964 World’s Fair, where Warhol made a mural of the NYPD’s most wanted men, rapidly painted over. Caro’s book is subtitled “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York”; in Everything Is Now, Hoberman reconstructs the New York that fell.”
—Dan Schindel, Art Newspaper

“I can’t remember the last book I’ve read that contained so much information so tightly packed, or in which the distillation of vast research offered such relentless ricochets of association, connection, and allusion. Although its meld of journalistic detective work, insightful analysis, and keen critical judgment might suggest a straightforward nonfiction account, it’s a work of obsession and devotion that finds a distinctive and original form—a hectic informational voracity—for its passionate archivism…as jubilantly overstuffed as its subtitle.”
—Richard Brody, The New Yorker