![\"\"](\"https://backend.artreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Untitled-1-copy-1-1230x922.jpg\")
Paul Morley’s Love Magic Power Danger Bliss is another Yoko Ono biography that ends up defining the artist in negative
\n\n\n\nMy first conscious encounter with Yoko Ono’s work as an artist was a butt watch: my mum sporting the artist’s collaboration with Swatch during the late 1990s, its face and strap adorned with naked bums from Ono’s Film No. 4 (1966–67). I’d also long heard her offkey wailing whenever The Plastic Ono Band’s Happy Xmas (War is Over) (1971) came on the radio; both being signs that Ono had, for decades, reached audiences and worked in expanded ways that most artists wish they could. As Ono’s retrospective exhibition Music of the Mind is still touring the world, the narrative of ‘liberating’ Ono from being perceived as just a ‘Beatles wife’, and to be appreciated as the conceptual artist she already was and is, persists. British music journalist Paul Morley’s Love Magic Power Danger Bliss is the latest biography of Ono (following on from those by Jerry Hopkins, Donald Brackett and most recently David She.) that again takes on this old trope, attempting to portray Ono’s artistic formation and creative context. Despite the stated aim, Morley’s book seems designed more to help all those lost rock dads who are still licking their wounds from the Beatles breakup (so perhaps rock-grandads) than to understand that Ono’s out-there behaviour wasn’t out of nowhere, but part of a transnational scene questioning the boundaries between life and art. ‘John Lennon will not be mentioned,’ Morley promises at the start. It’s a promise he fails to keep.
\n\n\n\nMorley’s tome ostensibly covers the first three decades of Ono’s life, from her birth in Japan, in 1933, culminating (tellingly) with the moment she met Lennon in London, in 1969. Taking up more space in the book, though, is the origins of the artistic ‘avant-garde’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through the Incoherents, to Dada, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Fluxus, with a token bit of Gutai thrown in for good measure. Morley consistently sets up what the experimental men were doing, then appends a note describing how Ono didn’t really play along with them; perhaps it’s an attempt to assert her ambivalent distinction from all else around her, how she was different, but it ends up defining her in negative. Lengthy asides on, say, George Maciunas’s attempts to control Fluxus, or Pete Townshend smashing his guitar as performance art, come to dominate the book, leaving Ono a silent, mostly passive presence in her own biography. Morley attempts to mediate this by liberally peppering the book with staccato interjections starting with ‘The Yoko Ono…’: ‘The Yoko Ono whose very existence was an act of rebellion’; ‘The Yoko Ono asking everyone to scream with her’; ‘The Yoko Ono inventing reality television’.
\n\n\n\nAmid a volley of run-on sentences and a dense hail of adjectives, swinging wildly between second and third person, past and present tense, Morley’s attempt to capture the anti-art and proto-conceptual movements that informed Ono’s work is energetic if two-dimensional. Despite all the characters enlisted, this is a biography without personalities, where a sense of intimacy and the lived contingencies behind the names, even Ono’s, is absent. For those even passingly interested in Ono’s artistic practice, Morley doesn’t offer much further insight in her work, as he labours to explain the Western roots of ‘happenings’ and expanded definitions of art to those who think art is still just paintings and Ono is still just a Beatles-breaker. Despite his scattered attention and hyperbolic claims, Morley positions Ono as a progenitor of New York’s 1960s downtown loft performance scene and a singular experimental figure, though he can’t help himself constantly alluding to her media-saturated post-1966 existence (at one point jaw-droppingly referring to her as ‘the avant-garde Jackie Kennedy’). While giving context to Ono’s long and varied career is welcome, Love Magic Power Danger Bliss feels like another man doing an extended guitar solo that drowns out her story.
\n\n\n\nLove Magic Power Danger Bliss: Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora by Paul Morley. Faber, £25 (hardcover)
\n\n\n\nFrom the April & May 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
\n\n\n\nRead next Yoko Ono at Tate Modern: Stopping Time, Punching Through
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