Anything Could Become a Battleground | Los Angeles Review of Books

Isaac Butler’s new book mixes history and personal testimony to examine the ‘culture wars’ that shaped the 1980s—conflicts that differed in striking ways from the ones we’re witnessing today.The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars by Isaac Butler. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2026. 384 pages.Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!A GRATING JOURNALISTIC CLICHÉ just now is the overuse of the notion of “era.” The headlines tell us we are living in the Trump era (or second Trump era); New Yorkers are living in the Mamdani era; we witnessed the climax of the Messi era during the World Cup. As Carlos Lozada observed in The New York Times about the first of these examples, “the compulsion to zero in on Trump alone keeps us from understanding the era fully, and from glimpsing what it might become.” And yet naming spans of time is natural and useful (as in Eric Hobsbawm’s “long nineteenth century” or Tony Judt’s “postwar”), and the work of cultural history depends on “periodicizing”—distinguishing one span from another and identifying distinctive characteristics of each.How, then, to do it authentically, especially when one’s own lifetime is involved? One way is to ground the effort in personal background and preoccupations, so as to keep from generalizing recklessly. In my case, writing a book about the 1980s meant drawing on my experience as a Catholic college student in New York during those years, which in turn involved complicating the notion of a “Reagan era” dominated by the political and religious Right. In the book, I sought to capture the variety and complexity of the decade, especially where religion was involved—how the rise and fall of the “televangelists” coincided with the hardening of Catholicism under Pope John Paul II and the apogee of progressive Catholic activism in Latin America, how the Pope’s aggressive promotion of traditional Catholic sexual morality fractured because of the crises of AIDS and clerical sexual abuse, and how post-sixties immigration quickened the religious diversity of the country as a whole. And I sought to spell out how the complexity of the moment called forth “crypto-religious” work—from Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” in 1979 to Sinéad O’Connor’s Saturday Night Live appearance in 1992 where she tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, and including U2’s and Leonard Cohen’s hymns to “the future”; Madonna’s hits, as well as Prince’s; and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988).Isaac Butler, the author of The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, came of age a few years later. As a young teenager in Washington, DC, in the 1990s, he was a professional stage actor, first in Falsettoland, “a musical about the American family and the AIDS crisis,” and then in Quilt: A Musical Celebration, which told “the (largely fictional) stories behind a dozen or more panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.” He viewed the quilt himself, joined other cast members at an ACT UP protest, and marched in the parade for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration. From Butler’s adolescence, then, the conflicts involving art and culture centered on the nation’s capital and the principle of free expression—whether in art or in life—as rooted in larger American ideas of freedom. Accordingly, The Perfect Moment treats a span of time roughly from 1985 to 1995, and it emphasizes the civic and legislative conflicts over free expression more than the longer and deeper forces—artistic, cultural, religious—that shaped the artists and their adversaries alike.Butler, following a precedent set by the sociologist James Davison Hunter in 1991, sees those conflicts as “culture wars,” and he applies the metaphor enthusiastically. His book “is in some ways a military history, of a war fought by other means. Through politics. Through religion. […] It’s the story of two sides—American artists and the religious right—who viewed their opponents as existential threats to their way of life.” And the two sides’ visions of life are rooted in rival versions of freedom. “[B]y the late twentieth century, anything from paintings to ads for jeans could become a battleground,” he observes.Regardless of what form they took, the real substance at stake in these fights was the nature, meaning, and limits of freedom in America. Does blasphemous art curtail religious freedom by making society more hostile to religion? Does hate speech do something similar to students of color on college campuses? Do restrictions on the content of government-funded art erode free expression? Who gets to define freedom, and does everyone’s freedom get to count?Those questions suggest a grand, even grandiose, exploration of the working-out of freedom in culture and the arts, akin to Louis Menand’s grand (even grandiose) exploration of the working-out of freedom in the 1950s, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (2021). In fact, The Perfect Moment is more tightly focused and purposive than that. Politically, it’s a story of left versus right. Formally, it’s three overlapping narratives. One involves notorious controversies centered on individual artists: Martin Scorsese, whose 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ was the subject of a vitriolic pressure campaign from Reverend Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association; Andres Serrano, whose photographic work Piss Christ (1987) drew the ire of Wildmon and then, in turn, of senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato; and Robert Mapplethorpe (“it’s pronounced with a long a, like the syrup,” writes Butler), whose photographs, exhibited at government-funded galleries in Washington, DC, and Cincinnati after his death in 1989, prompted a furor over the grant-making practices of the National Endowment for the Arts. Another narrative chronicles the Republican Party’s efforts to curtail the arts agency or dissolve it, which entangled some artists. A third is an account of arts administrators who sought to preserve some part of the independence of the agencies and galleries they led, and who made compromises they came to regret.The book is replete with striking details all the way through. Helms was known as “Senator No.” Allan Bloom, author of the best-selling conservative screed The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (1987), was gay and an atheist. From 1965 to the end of the century, “the number of symphony orchestras nearly doubled, from 980 to 1,800.” The National Endowment for the Arts funded the American Film Institute (alma mater of David Lynch and Terrence Malick) and supported the California Indian Basketweavers Association with a major grant. New York University Medical Center refused to place patients with AIDS in the same rooms as patients who did not have AIDS, “leading many to receive treatment (and die) in overcrowded ER hallways.” Representative Barney Frank distinguished between the work of Mapplethorpe (“celebratory”) and Serrano (“denigrating”). Circa 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in DC was broke.The sections centered on individual artists deal with material treated amply elsewhere (including in my own book), which enables Butler to step out more as a writer than a chronicler. The Scorsese episode is vivid, fleet, perceptive, and sly: “Jesus rose from the grave after three days; it would take five years to resurrect Scorsese’s film about him” after it was canceled due to Wildmon’s pressure campaign. “The boulder rolled from the film’s tomb due less to divine intervention and more because Scorsese had, by 1988, made The Color of Money, his first mega hit.” The Serrano episode is enlivened by Butler’s interview with the artist: “‘The piss was mine,’ he said. ‘Initially I had my wife contribute to one of my pictures with piss, but I determined that mine had the brighter yellow.’” The Mapplethorpe episode is deftly revisionist, reminding us that the photographer, now a queer icon, “made S&M photographs for only a few years” and that they are more formalist than realist:Unlike the work of Mapplethorpe’s rough contemporary Nan Goldin, there’s no sense of spontaneity, of the snapshot, of catching a moment of unexpected intimacy. The “perfect moment” of a Mapplethorpe image is perfect because it has been painstakingly constructed, and then even more painstakingly retouched in the lab after.In the art world, Butler notes, the controversy over Mapplethorpe involved whether he was an artist or just a fashion photographer.As the so-called culture wars became protracted, the stakes were lowered. The question of whether Scorsese’s screen depiction honored the orthodox definition of Christ as fully God and fully man gave way to the question of whether performance art where the artist smeared her naked body in chocolate was really art. In The Perfect Moment, the stories of Scorsese, Serrano, and Mapplethorpe are followed by those of Dennis Barrie, John Frohnmayer, Jane Alexander, and Susan Wyatt, arts professionals all; as the pages are turned, art and artists are overtaken by acronyms, amendments, rescindments, and memoranda. Even so, Butler brings surprising vigor to his telling of the story of government heavy-handedness and curatorial clumsiness when it comes to the arts. Sketches of David Wojnarowicz, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley (she of the chocolate smearing), and Tim Miller are folded in alongside ones of Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. We learn that Pete Hamill wrote a column for The Village Voice objecting to the paper’s laudatory coverage of Finley’s act; we’re reminded that Vice President Dan Quayle objected to the episode of CBS’s