Critic and theater director Isaac Butler is younger than I am, so he didn’t live through the Culture Wars of the Reagan ’80s. During this time, for instance, the Morality Action Committee wrote postcards to legislators across the country claiming that Franklin Furnace — the arts organization I founded 50 years ago — had shown pornography to 500 children per day during our Carnival Knowledge exhibition of women artists exploring sexuality. But as an art aficionado, he saw an alarming development in 2020, when an exhibition of Philip Guston’s work was postponed by the Tate Modern; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the National Gallery of Art for fear that his paintings referencing the Ku Klux Klan might be misinterpreted by the public. In light of the current rise of right-wing legislators, politicians, and organizations targeting arts and culture in the United States, the parallel story of the conservative players of the 1980s and ’90s needs to be told.
Butler’s book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars (2026), discusses major events in that tumultuous era of the 1980s and ’90s, including the difficulty Martin Scorsese had producing The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), primarily caused by Reverend Donald Wildmon’s innovation of mass mailing to Christians on behalf of his National Federation for Decency. Wildmon appears again in Butler’s discussion of Andres Serrano’s infamous “Piss Christ” (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a beaker of the artist’s urine. In 1989, then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato ripped a reproduction of a catalog image of Serrano’s artwork in half on the Senate floor.
Then there’s the story that gives the book its name: the cancellation of The Perfect Moment, a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. By the mid-1980s, Mapplethorpe’s AIDS diagnosis had become common knowledge. Although The Perfect Moment had traveled nationally, its depiction of sadomasochism, Black nude models, and naked children was likely going to get a reaction in Washington. So on June 12, 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art decided to cancel the exhibition before it opened, after which Jesse Helms and Sidney Yates, a Democratic Congressman from Illinois, fought over the funding of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) itself. Butler provides a balanced account of how both sides strategized and implemented their ambitions.