Lauren O’Neill-Butler. All Ears
At 6:30 pm on Wednesday, 21 May 2025
Join us on Wednesday, 21 May at 6:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art for a public talk by New York-based writer and editor Lauren O’Neill-Butler. This lecture continues the series of this year’s programme of events dedicated to discussions on art criticism, art writing and critical practices, organised in the context of the Visual Art Criticism Awards.
Lauren O’Neill-Butler explores the value of public speech and the craft of listening — and how having such conversations is necessary to a feminist practice. In this keynote, the role of the interview in art criticism will take center stage, and an argument will be made that in conversations between two or three people, there is real rigor and intimacy. When there are more people involved, a collective hive-think starts to come in. It’s just a different power dynamic.
Hannah Arendt famously wrote about making private thoughts public and how that can persuade someone, change someone’s mind, get them to come to your side, or maybe you join their side. Simone Weil argued that “Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate.”
What does it mean to focus one’s criticism on the primacy of text, the cultivation of the spoken word? Is real, unaffected curiosity a form that we’ve sadly lost? And what does feminism have to do with any of this?
Lauren O’Neill-Butler is a New York-based writer, editor, and educator. Her books include The War of Art: A History of Artists’ Protest in America (Verso, 2025) and Let’s Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture (Karma, 2021). She has written for Aperture, Art Journal, Bookforum, and The New York Times, among many others, and has also contributed essays to many exhibition catalogues. She received a Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant in 2020 and the Beverley Art Writers Travel Grant in 2023.
Lecture will be held in English.
Free of charge, no prior registration needed.
Event is organised in the context of the Visual Art Criticism Awards.
Organised by: Artnews.lt, Contemporary Art Centre, National Gallery of Art
Financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture
22 Konstitucijos Ave, LT-08105, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 212 2997,
info@ndg.lt
www.ndg.lt
