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Love Magic Power Danger Bliss: Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora

Paul Morley

Bestselling author Paul Morley’s cultural history of the twentieth century Avant-Garde movement, told through the life and work of one of its most influential and acclaimed stalwarts.

5 in stock

£25.00
Format
Hardback
ISBN
9780571379248
Date Published
12.03.2026

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Summary

Art is my life and my life is art . . .

The story of the twentieth-century avant-garde is a story of resistance, of the outsider, of strangeness, of individual freedom, of rejecting the ordinary and overcoming marginalisation through self-invention. It is also a story that can be told through the prism of one of its most renowned figureheads: Yoko Ono.

From her early life escaping aristocratic Japanese society and the horrors of World War II to adventurous and productive exile in New York, Ono’s work built upon the histories of Dada, surrealism, Zen Buddhism, and experimental music. A significant influence on the elusive Fluxus artistic network, she was connected to all its major personalities. Pursuing dreams of revolutionary liberation and aiming to recreate shattered post-war reality through performance, art and text, she established a legacy – despite her tumultuous personal life – as one of the most visionary artists and activists of her generation.

Marking the intersection of biography, cultural history and artistic meditation, Love Magic Power Danger Bliss explores the deep history and vitality of the 20th century avant-garde movement and the inspiring, provocative figure who became its most celebrated, most misunderstood icon.

Critic Reviews

Love Magic Power Danger Bliss feels like the complex, resonant, endlessly curious book Ono deserves — a happening all of its own.

Sunday Times

Critic Reviews

[Morley's] written about one of the most widely known but underappreciated and misunderstood contemporary artists . . . You might wonder if another book about Yoko Ono is necessary, but Love Magic Power Danger Bliss isn't only about her . . . This is more a creation myth around the fermentation of avant garde/conceptual/minimalist art.

Mark Webber, The Wire

Critic Reviews

Morley unrolls a rich canvas of artists and art movements, from Dada and Futurism to the Yoko-affiliated Fluxus group, providing illuminating context to Ono's conceptual, often interactive art

Mojo 4****

Critic Reviews

Morley’s narrative teleports us somewhere that is far less visited: Ono as a virtual unknown, picking her way through the New York avant-garde scene of the earlier 1960s, where she not only thrives but becomes a key power player . . . Responding to Trump’s first election victory, she tweeted @realDonaldTrump with a recording of a full-throated scream—her instinct had long been to defy authoritarian behaviour, and Morley does a superlative job of examining all the hows and whys.

Philip Clark, Prospect

Critic Reviews

In Love Magic Power Danger Bliss, Paul Morley rescues Yoko Ono from popular resentment. It’s a bracing read in which Morley’s enthusiasm for avant garde disturbance is rendered as both a catalogue and a manifesto

Uncut 8/10

Critic Reviews

A vivid celebration of the artist . . . [Morley's] Ono is headstrong, questing.

Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian

PaulMorley

Writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic Paul Morley has written about music, art, and entertainment since the 1970s. He wrote for the New Musical Express from 1976 to 1983 and formed the Zang Tumb Tuum record label with record producer Trevor Horn. A founding member of the Art of Noise and a member of staff at the Royal Academy of Music,…

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PaulMorley

Paul Morley