June 12: J. Hoberman—Everything Is Now
Presented by 192 Books, J. Hoberman in conversation with Eric Banks about his book Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop (Verso, 2025)
This event will take place in person at 192 Books at 192 10th Ave on Thursday, June 12th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served. The discussion will also be streamed directly on this page. There is no login required. A recording will be archived.
Books will be available for sale after the conversation.
J. Hoberman—Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop (Verso, 2025)
Like Paris in the 1920s, New York City in the 1960s was a cauldron of avant-garde ferment and artistic innovation. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and the alternative press, Everything Is Now chronicles this collective drama as it was played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters, and, ultimately, the streets. The principals here are penniless filmmakers, jazz musicians, performing poets, and less classifiable artists: Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and many more. As J. Hoberman shows in this riveting history, these artists and their respective subcultures coalesced into a counterculture that changed the city, the country, and the world.
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 avant-garde, 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.
Eric Banks is director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. He is the former senior editor of Artforum and former editor in chief of Bookforum. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, 4Columns, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and he has contributed to monographs on artists including Christopher Wool, Franz West, and Matthew Barney. He is the consulting editor of the Robert Rauschenberg catalogue raisonné.