The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars

Critic and historian Butler (The Method) offers a comprehensive overview of the religious right’s targeting of artists and arts funding in the 1980s and ’90s. The account begins with a 1974 school board fight over a proposed new curriculum in Kanawha County, W.Va., which spiraled into “a season of acrimony, terror, and violence,” including shootings and bombings. The episode marked the emergence of a newly emboldened right, led by the likes of North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, that realized “concessions could be wrung... if protestors simply caused enough trouble.” This same pattern played out repeatedly, Butler shows, as he surveys the era’s biggest flash points, including the cancellation of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s posthumous exhibition in Washington, D.C.; the vetoing of NEA fellowships for four performance artists; and artist David Wojnarowicz’s inflammatory essay fantasizing about “dousing... Helms in gasoline and burning him to death.” Throughout, Butler incisively highlights the spiraling damage inflicted by the tepid responses of arts supporters like NEA chairman John Frohnmayer, who, desperate to protect the Endowment, agreed to diminish artists’ freedom of expression, and of the liberal establishment as a whole, which squeamishly demurred from defending works like Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with “a whip stuck in his rectum.” While disappointingly light on connections to present-day government censorship efforts, this nonetheless makes for a dramatic retelling of a sea change in American arts and politics. (June)