The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s

Elie (Reinventing Bach), a senior fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, probes the origins of the American culture wars in this detailed if oblique history. At the center of his account are the so-called “controverts” who used “crypto-religious” language, tropes, and images to undermine traditional religious beliefs in the 1980s. They include Andy Warhol, who expressed his complicated religious identity in silkscreen prints of apostles and Brillo boxes, the latter of which played on Catholic-inflected notions of the “ordinary as holy,” according to Elie. Also spotlighted are Madonna, who embodied a “struggle with traditional female ideals—of womanhood and motherhood, of virtue and erotic power,” and Martin Scorsese, whose long-delayed The Last Temptation of Christ cut against Christian ideas that Christ’s teachings were self-evident without historical interpretation. Elie situates this artistic ferment against the backdrop of an American Christian culture and a Catholic church that was grappling with sexual abuse within its ranks as well as the AIDS crisis. In the process, he probes how artists and popular culture understood and reacted to shifting currents of “authority and individual conscience,” devotion and desire, and institutional hypocrisy. While the implications of those questions are fascinating and the individual artist profiles are vivid, Elie struggles to slot the book’s various elements into a cohesive argument. It adds up to an intriguing yet disorganized portrait of a tumultuous decade. (May)