In J. Hoberman’s telling, there’s nothing easy about New York’s avant-garde. Much of the art described in Everything Is Now was difficult to be around, sometimes aggressively so. The Museum of Modern Art’s guards asked to wear sunglasses in the optically jarring 1965 exhibition “The Responsive Eye.” During a Village Vanguard performance that same year, LeRoi Jones and Archie Shepp told their “predominantly—predictably—white, liberal, middle-class” audience, according to Vivian Gornick’s write-up, that “the only thing you can do for me is die.” Openings involved midnight screenings, spectators vomiting, confusion. A flyer released by Yoko Ono and La Monte Young warned their audience to “come prepared to sit on the floor” of Ono’s unheated Chambers Street loft for a six-month series of concerts; it also emphasized in all caps that “THE PURPOSE OF THIS SERIES IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT.”

The sheer number of works from the 1960s that were “brutal and exhausting,” in the words of one poet describing a competitive jam session, overwhelms. The filmmaker and musician Tony Conrad used strobes to expand on William Burroughs’s claim that various stimuli other than drugs could also induce synesthetic experiences; his experimental film The Flicker (1966) screened with the warning that “audience members remained in the theater at their own risk.” In a footnote that feels like a coda to the whole book, we learn that while “sensory overload” was first explored by the sociologist Georg Simmel in 1903 in his essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” the term gained traction in psychiatry, and then among artists, in the 1960s. It was a strategy as much as a condition.

Everything Is Now is a sweeping trove of obscure facts and colorful figures, plucked from hundreds of sources, tracing a countercultural groundswell that swiftly coalesced into mainstream myth. The city had an embarrassment of broadside riches during the rough decade covered by this book, circa 1958 to 1971; The Village Voice, where Hoberman would later spend four decades as an influential film critic,and The East Village Other, which the Blondie musician Chris Stein once described as “fucking nuts,” stand out. The city’s happenings, politicians, arrests, poets, riots, and explosions shared the spread with impassioned criticism and raunchy personal ads.

Reading Everything Is Now is also like reading a newspaper: while it proceeds more or less chronologically, there’s no single narrative arc but rather many rapid-fire episodes. You’ll find Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan and Yayoi Kusama and Norman Mailer on the same page as lesser known but crucial figures like the poet and activist David Henderson, the experimental filmmaker Jack Smith, and the filmmaker and agitator Barbara Rubin, who apparently also organized orgies for Allen Ginsberg. Jonas Mekas, described by Warhol as “one of those people who are serious about everything, even when they laugh,” gets a lot of space; his writing in the Voice and his own magazine, Film Culture, about the films he was making, seeing, and screening helped define the new cinema. Two trailblazing women whose deaths bracketed the decade are presented as benevolent saints of influence: the filmmaker Maya Deren, dead at forty-four in 1961, and the sculptor and painter Eva Hesse, dead at thirty-four in 1970. The artist Joan Jonas, still active today, who used her apartment as a set and the streets of New York as her props, is surprisingly a mere footnote, and mentions of the poet and filmmaker Storm de Hirsch, who made her first short by etching on film stock with a screwdriver because she didn’t have a camera, are relatively scant. But is it crazy to want more people in this book? Yes, yes it is. As at a crowded party, not everyone is properly introduced before they drift away toward the drinks. There’s assumed knowledge but also information overload. It’s a lot to move through—this is not a quick read—but often thrilling.

Everything Is Now changes how we understand the relationship between the avant-garde and the tumult of the Sixties. Hoberman helps us see that the exhibitions and evolving styles and new media did more than merely reflect their era. The work of this cohort, and the deliberate challenge to aesthetic appreciation it posed, was drawn into the country’s political struggles around race, gender, economic welfare, and individual freedoms. He links the city’s “demonstrations, insurrections, strikes, trials, sit-ins, be-ins, bombings” to the rise of performance art; New York in the Sixties was “one giant happening on an epic urban stage.”

The term “avant-garde” is famously borrowed from the military, and throughout the book, Hoberman underscores the mainstream guard that inspired the opposition: a cold war belief in the promises of the “nuclear family” and the suburban middle class, along with new city zoning that encouraged segregation and violent enforcement of laws that criminalized homosexuality, among other policies. A clash between this culture and art that refused all forms of comfort was inevitable (though New York’s avant-garde was hardly a monolith and was often also at war with itself). Censorship crackdowns became commonplace and were sometimes uncanny: the conservative senator Strom Thurmond arranged to screen Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), a work that had been seized by police, in a “film festival” in a basement office of the Capitol to underscore its obscenity. Hoberman describes countless intense raids and arrests by the recently formed Public Morals Squad of the New York Police Department at film screenings, gay bars, the offices of pornographic tabloids, comics shops, and comedy shows. “CITY PUTS BOMB UNDER OFF-BEAT CULTURE SCENE” ran the Voice on page 1 in 1964.

The long decade saw unprecedented influence by a few wealthy men in New York and accelerated development, and therefore displacement, of working-class and industrial neighborhoods; it saw the rise of unemployment, crime, and drugs. The book spends time with David Henderson’s extraordinary poem “Keep on Pushing,” about the 1964 Harlem uprising, in which Henderson chronicles “Negro handymen put to work because of the riots boarding up smashed storefronts/….The pine boards are the nearest Lenox Avenue/Will ever have to trees.” Part of the goal of the aggressive tactics of radical art made during this period was to jostle the city out of its postwar complacency and moral retrenchment, or, as the artist Carolee Schneemann put it, “to enliven my guilty culture.” In addition to creating uncompromising works, artists kept up a steady if staid beat of performative actions at museums (mostly MoMA), including removing their work from exhibitions during regular hours, replacing sculpture with manifestos, and picketing.

These actions came amid a boom in the art economy. Abstract Expressionism had anointed New York the art capital of the world, and as the gallery circuit swiftly expanded, so did a collecting public who saw art—particularly discrete objects that fit above a couch—as a sound investment. The market’s rapid assimilation of painting and sculpture avant-gardes only fueled artists’ extreme reaction against placating this growing audience. P. Adams Sitney, the Factory habitue, occasional actor, cofounder of Anthology Film Archive, and film scholar who passed away last June, staked his career on arguing that avant-garde cinema was not meant to appeal to the masses or to hold the audience’s hand. “There’s some ridiculous notion that art can be democratic,” he remarked in an interview in 2015. “Art is the least democratic of all things!”

This was art that, in the words of Claes Oldenburg’s famous statement from 1961, was “political-erotic-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum”—art that “grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.” Hoberman’s admiration for this “cultural craziness” is less about nostalgia than about not giving a shit, about deliberate provocations that worked against the relentless beat of conformist capitalism and, for many artists, against the lingering trauma of segregation, exile, and war. (A book on artists of this period and the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital is overdue.)

Hoberman places art at the center of the world during this anxious era, often to dazzling effect. Describing Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (assumed to have been written during the height of the Cuban missile crisis but actually first performed a month before), he writes:

Still, the evening of October 24, when Soviet ships neared but did not attempt to cross the blockade of American ships surrounding Cuba, when Norman Mailer wondered if he was seeing Manhattan landmarks for the last time, and Sol LeWitt, then a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, observed paintings by Picasso and Matisse (“all the great masterpieces”) hurriedly moved to a secret bunker, Dylan again sang the song at Town Hall.

This doesn’t always work. “Death bells were tolling, not just for the art world. There were now close to 50,000 American fatal casualties in Vietnam,” reads a passage that uneasily combines metaphor with hideous reality. And with so many characters on every page, there isn’t time to bring nuance or pathos to complex figures like Candy Darling, who appears as a “drag queen.” (Luckily we have the recent biography by Cynthia Carr, another Voice writer, to flesh out that story.) Most jarring is the fleeting mention of Judith Malina’s rape during a Living Theater performance of Paradise Now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a horrific turn in the radical audience participation of the group’s “total theater” experience.

The book’s lack of an overarching narrative, of course, mirrors much of the work Hoberman describes, from the experimental films to the time capsules Warhol began during this period, scooping art, magazines, unopened mail, and receipts into cardboard boxes. It’s also a function of Hoberman’s own position as a participant in the scene, which he was drawn to as a twenty-year-old aspiring writer and cinephile. Though it is poignant to read Hoberman describe his book in its final lines as “a memoir, although not mine,” it also feels like a hedge against its lack of historical analysis. The handful of moments in which he emerges in the first person are exhilarating—you have a trusted guide with a sense of humor and a brilliant eye who grew up in New York just after World War II, wore dog tags in kindergarten, had the filmmaker Ken Jacobs as a teacher, and found himself at a “living room lecture” just above the East Village in 1971 with the cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. (Hoberman appears much more often in The Freaks Came Out to Write, Tricia Romano’s remarkable 2024 oral history of The Village Voice.)

Broader themes do coalesce amid the relentless onslaught of events, but the reader is left to make those connections across hundreds of pages and descriptions of works. One is what we might call artists’ emergent self-awareness in the face of increasing media coverage, and the ways they attempted to exploit their own exploitation. We find the photographer Fred McDarrah’s tongue-in-cheek Rent-a-Beatnik service, which offered artists and poets like Ted Joans for cocktail parties; Warhol’s Village Voice ad in which, like a latter-day influencer, he proposes endorsing “clothing, AC-DC, cigarettes, sound equipment, ROCK N ROLL RECORDS, anything, film and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY!!” Yayoi Kusuma wanted to perform her happening “exclusively for press.” Charlotte Moorman embraced the irony of bringing the underground to the sky with her 1968 Avant-Garde Festival parade down Central Park West, where she appeared as a float attached to ten helium balloons. Oldenburg circumvented the emergent gallery market in New York in 1961, renting a storefront to sell messy chicken-wire-and-plaster renderings of everyday objects in a project he titled TheStore. As the poet and critic Frank O’Hara described it, “You find cakes your mother never baked, letters you never received, jackets you never stole when you broke into that apartment, and a bride that did not pose for Rembrandt’s famous Jewish ceremony.”

Another theme, to borrow the title of one of the best books of the Sixties, is the death and life of great American cities. We know from The Freaks Come Out that the Voice hit its stride during the great newspaper strike of 1962, because it became the only place to advertise apartments. (The founding editors of The New YorkReview took advantage of the same opportunity, as publishers had nowhere else to advertise their books.) Only a few years after many downtown artists lost their buildings to development, lofts in SoHo, protected from demolition by a zoning change that permitted artist loft residences, were advertised in the paper for sale at $2,500, with copy imploring artists to come live there as part of new cooperatives. Many artists in New York in the 1960s “benefited from the era of cheap rents—perhaps the greatest facilitator of artistic innovation,” as Hoberman puts it. Many of their works focused, with a curious and even loving gaze, on the shifting infrastructure of the city itself, the rapid loss of certain manufacturing trades, and the quandary of “making a living” as an artist, sometimes by making the most of someone else’s ruin. (It goes without saying that many of the artists quoted throughout Everything Is Now were living in poverty.)

The artist Michael Snow borrowed a 16mm camera from Ken Jacobs in 1967 and set it up at one end of his Canal Street loft, slowly zooming in over two weeks on a photograph of the sea pinned up between windows on the far wall. At one point a man staggers in and collapses on the floor. The soundtrack includes a crescendoing sine wave produced by an audio oscillator. Though Wavelength was heralded for its structural innovation, Snow’s neighbor, the artist and critic Manny Farber, also saw it as a monument to the city, “a straightforward document of a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and gone bankrupt.” Just after moving back to New York in 1966, Danny Lyon began photographing the sixty acres below Canal Street that were slated for demolition, rezoning, and redevelopment, photos he published as The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969) a few years later.

Hoberman points out that while so many other filmmakers were being arrested for obscenity or struggling to find a way to produce or show their work, even Warhol’s importance was predicated on his ability to subsidize his own studio. When Bleecker Street Cinema got skittish about screening scandalous films, Jacobs organized impromptu evenings at his Ferry Street loft by the Fulton Fish Market, a neighborhood featured in his film The Sky Socialist (1965–1966). Hoberman’s description of that film is a rare moment when the manic buzz of the decade quiets down and we get a reverie of the artist’s neighborhood, through

a movie about the beauty of things as they are. The artist casts a glance; the sparse narrative is put on hold so the camera can ponder the grandeur of the Bridge, the proximity of the East River, the caverns created by the arched Municipal Buildings, the top of the Tombs, the clerks spending their lunch hour on park benches. All action is digression; everything is now.

But the sensory overload must go on. As with so much of the artwork it chronicles, the challenge of how to receive this book is on the audience, not the maker. The absurdity of the avant-garde’s endeavor is what saves it over and over. Why was I always looking for a thesis, a tidy narrative? Yes, it’s nice to sometimes hear sound other than abstract sine waves or a frustrated crowd—but what does nice have to do with New York?