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.
The artists who would come to be known as “The NEA Four,” Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller — all of whom take sexuality to be a legitimate subject of their performance art — received grants from the NEA Visual Artists Fellowship program, which began in 1966. But by 1995, the NEA itself was under attack and their grants were rescinded. Butler provides a detailed account of this complex moment in political and social and artistic history. The NEA Four sued and their grants were restored, but the artists and their attorneys decided to contest the Helms Amendment decency provisions that had been added to NEA grant contracts. This became National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley et al., which was heard by the Supreme Court. Long story short, the artists lost; the case was submitted at 11:18am on March 31, 1998, and the Helms language was preserved.
By the mid-1980s, the artists began organizing around the idea of promoting and protecting freedom of expression in the US. The National Association of Artists’ Organizations (NAAO) was formed in 1982 and the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression in 1989. This was an effort by the artists’ organizations themselves to come up with strategies to survive and thrive in the increasingly hostile art world. One group was ACT UP, which created a poster, SILENCE=DEATH, a pink triangle (the symbol used by the Nazis to designate gay people) on a black background. Another was Artists Space, which held an exhibition, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, proposed by Nan Goldin and featuring work by David Wojnarowicz, among other artists affected by the AIDS epidemic. John Frohnmayer, head of the NEA in 1989, and Susan Wyatt, then-director of Artists Space, held talks which eventually led to the funding of the exhibition — but not its catalog, which contained a scathing essay by Wojnarowicz.
Butler has done the research. I recommend this book without reservation because it is a thorough, accurate account of a fraught time in American history, when artists were motivated to take action to ensure that their freedom of expression is preserved — just like the present moment.
The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars (2026) by Isaac Butler is published by Bloomsbury and available online and through independent booksellers.
–Martha Wilson