Kornbluh’s Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism was the most buzzed-about book of art theory this year, and with good reason. It persuasively links myriad twenty-first-century cultural developments – from experiential art, to first-person narration in fiction and TV, to the personality cult of artists themselves – in their rejection of that foundational quality of artistry, mediation, and ties this in turn to a wider impatience fostered by contemporary capitalism. For Kornbluh, a Chicago-based writer and academic, we’ve been conditioned to expect everything now, frictionlessly, whether art or online shopping, and to sell ourselves too. After reading, you may see everything from the revival of digestible figurative painting to the leveraging of artists’ identities through Kornbluh’s lens. The book’s subtitle boldly positions it as a successor to Fredric Jameson’s era-defining Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). But it’s not bragging if you back it up, and Immediacy does.