This episode features a conversation with literary theorist Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (VERSO, 2024). We discuss her ideas on the cultural style of immediacy and its effects on visual art, what she identifies as the current period of art history, and her argument about the conditions that led to the rise of auto-fiction and the single-person narrative in contemporary writing.

In 2025, she was ranked number nine on the Art Review Power 100 list. Her recent essays have explored topics such as infrastructure cinema, the death drive, solidarity, and feminist abstraction. She is the author of Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, published by Verso Books in 2024. Currently, Kornbluh is working on two forthcoming books. The first, Climate Counter-Aesthetics, argues for forms that can test prevailing ecological artworks and counter eco-critical paradigms. And the second, Good Enough Art, offers a theory of mid-aesthetics in the context of disappearing middle-class economics, a topic discussed in this episode.