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"The War of Art" | Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Eva Díaz, and Walter Benn Michaels

Join Verso for a panel on The War of Art by Lauren O'Neill-Butler, who will be joined in conversation by Eva Diaz and Walter Benn Michaels.

30 September 2025

"The War of Art" | Lauren O'Neill-Butler, Eva Díaz, and Walter Benn Michaels

Join Verso Books for a panel on Lauren O'Neill-Butler's latest book The War of Art . She will be joined in conversation by Eva Diaz and Walter Benn Michaels.

Due to limited space an RSVP will be required to attend.

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About the panelists:

Lauren O'Neill-Butler is a writer and editor. Her first book, Let’s Have a Talk: Conversations with Women on Art and Culture, (Karma, 2021) brings together nearly ninety interviews. A former Senior Editor of Artforum, she has also contributed to Aperture, Art Journal, and The New York Times. In 2020, she received an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant.

Walter Benn Michaels is a former professor who writes on art and politics. His most recent books are (with Adolph Reed) No Politics But Class Politics and The Beauty of a Social Problem. Recent essays have appeared in Jacobin, Damage, and nonsite. He and Daniel Zamora are currently completing (for Verso) a book called Deindustrial Aesthetics. He lives in Manhattan.

Eva Díaz is an art historian and critic based in Rockaway Beach, New York She is the author of The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (Chicago, 2015) and After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia and Other Science Fictions (Yale, 2025) She was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2023-2024, and is Professor of Contemporary Art History at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She is currently completing a book that explores non-visual experiences in art, such as olfaction, topological procedures, and haptics, by examining the overvaluation of certain experiences in culture (vision and cognition, distance and analysis, for example) and the devaluation of others (smell and sensuality, proximity and the body). www.evadiaz.net

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