J. Hoberman’s new book Everything is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde – Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop is a thrilling, deeply informed journey through one of the most electrifying cultural decades in modern history. With the precision of a seasoned film critic and the sweep of a cultural historian, Hoberman paints a vivid picture of the chaotic, creative, and revolutionary ferment that defined New York in the 1960s. Central to the book is the towering figure of Andy Warhol, whose influence continues to resonate through art history, the art market, and the contemporary collections of leading galleries like Andipa Editions. For collectors, critics, and enthusiasts alike, Everything is Now offers a compelling context for understanding Warhol's enduring relevance, while spotlighting the network of artists, filmmakers, and provocateurs who shaped the avant-garde movement alongside him.
Hoberman doesn’t just tell the story of Warhol, he places him within a wider, pulsating ecosystem of innovation. This is not the neatly packaged pop art narrative of Campbell’s soup and Marilyn Monroe prints, but a messier, more radical view of Warhol's world, a world that included Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, and countless others on the fringes of commercial art. This was the New York underground, where visual art, film, music, and performance intersected to produce something altogether new, raw, and often confrontational. In that landscape, Warhol’s Factory was both a studio and a stage, a space where boundaries between life and art collapsed in real time. Everything is Now is saturated with that energy, and it’s impossible to read it without reflecting on how Warhol’s work, much of which is represented in Andipa Editions’ collection, continues to challenge our understanding of celebrity, reproduction, and image culture.
For those familiar with Warhol through his silkscreens and prints - the iconic portraits of Elizabeth Taylor, Mao, or the Electric Chair series - Hoberman’s book offers a chance to see those works not as isolated art objects, but as part of a broader cultural performance. Warhol's embrace of mass production was not merely aesthetic, it was deeply philosophical. He blurred the line between artist and brand, and Hoberman is especially effective in tracing how that sensibility evolved in real-time, often in parallel with radical developments in film and media. Warhol’s early experiments with underground cinema - Sleep, Empire, Chelsea Girls - are covered in vivid detail, revealing an artist as interested in duration, boredom, and voyeurism as he was in glamour and fame. Hoberman understands that to fully grasp Warhol’s legacy, one must see the art not just as object, but as event, and this is where the book truly excels.
For Andipa Editions, which holds a significant selection of Warhol prints, Everything is Now deepens the dialogue around these works. Collectors may already appreciate the visual impact and market value of Warhol’s screenprints, but Hoberman invites us to engage with them historically and intellectually. Take the Dollar Sign series, for instance: often viewed as playful or ironic, they are also, in Hoberman’s telling, deadly serious. Created during a period of Reagan-era capitalism, but rooted in a 1960s ethos of collapsing high and low culture, these prints are both celebration and critique. Similarly, Warhol’s Mick Jagger portraits become not just studies in rock stardom, but documents of the crossover between counterculture and mass media, something Warhol both prophesied and engineered.
Hoberman’s deep dive into the avant-garde’s relationship with cinema is particularly illuminating for understanding Warhol’s multi-disciplinary legacy. In the 1960s, artists were no longer confined to canvas; they were turning to 16mm film, Polaroid photography, Xerox machines, and live performance. Warhol’s ability to absorb and amplify these influences helped him become not only a leading figure in pop art, but a catalyst for a new way of thinking about art’s place in society. At Andipa, this expansive view of Warhol’s practice aligns with how we present his work: not just as collectible prints, but as cultural artifacts loaded with meaning, history, and provocation. Everything is Now is not a biography, nor is it a linear art history. Instead, it reads like a cultural map; dense, rich, and exhilarating. Hoberman moves between venues like the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, Judson Memorial Church, and the Factory, bringing to life the fluid, collaborative nature of the 1960s avant-garde. Readers come away with a profound sense of how experimentalism wasn’t a niche concern but a driving force behind much of what is now considered mainstream. In this context, Warhol doesn’t just appear as a pop artist but as a central node in a web of radical experimentation that redefined the very nature of art.
For collectors and followers of Andipa Editions, Hoberman’s book provides a valuable perspective on the era that birthed so many of the works we now hold in such esteem. Warhol’s screenprints, often considered beautiful or iconic for their surface appeal, gain deeper resonance when understood against the backdrop of underground cinema, performance art, and cultural revolution. They are part of a larger story – one that Hoberman tells with insight and authority. In celebrating the avant-garde, he makes a case for Warhol not just as a pop artist, but as a documentarian of his time, a mirror to a society in flux, and a genius of both image-making and myth-making. In short, Everything is Now is essential reading for anyone interested in Andy Warhol, postwar art, or the wild creative energy of 1960s New York. For those who collect or admire Warhol’s works, whether it’s the Mao series, the Ingrid Bergman portraits, or the Skulls, Hoberman’s book offers a powerful reminder of the context that made such works possible. At Andipa Editions, we’re proud to offer access to these pieces, and proud too to participate in a continuing conversation about what makes Warhol not only important, but endlessly relevant.
