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.

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 Murphy Brown (1988–98) in which Candice Bergen’s character became pregnant and elected to raise the child as a single mother—thereby “mocking the importance of fathers […] and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” The incident drew a Daily News headline: “Quayle to Murphy Brown: You Tramp!”

A more precise subtitle for the book might have been “Artists, Evangelists, Appointees, and the Unresolved Conflicts over Free Expression in American Public Life.” And yet the less obviously gripping parts of Butler’s book may be the more necessary ones. In this sense, The Perfect Moment is akin to the quilt that Butler saw firsthand as a young man: it brings together stories of art-world people whose undertakings might be otherwise forgotten.

An especially detailed set piece involves the “Day Without Art,” held in 1989 to recognize the deaths of artists from AIDS; the efforts of the Artists Space gallery to join the effort, through an art-and-photo exhibition; and the gallery’s application to the NEA for $10,000 to help fund an exhibition catalog, which was approved “right as the Helms amendment [against indecency in government-funded art] upended the field.” News of the grant sparked controversy, leading to several rounds of negotiation between Artists Space’s Susan Wyatt and the NEA’s John Frohnmayer over how the grant would be applied and publicized, and culminating with Frohnmayer’s visit to Artists Space before the exhibition opened—by which time Chuck Barris, host of The Gong Show (1976–80), had offered to spot the gallery a personal grant. When Frohnmayer arrived, protesters were waiting en masse, as was Wojnarowicz, whose friend and lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, had died of AIDS:

David Wojnarowicz spoke at a press conference in a Ronald Reagan mask and read from Horton Hears a Who! In a private meeting with artists, Frohnmayer asked the assembled what he could do to avoid a similar debacle in the future […] but his audience didn’t want to hear it. Wojnarowicz told him to his face to resign.

The story belongs to history alongside the story of the fall of the Berlin Wall a few days earlier. (The Voice, Butler reports, likened the narrowing of the NEA to “Mr. Frohnmayer’s Wall.”)

What, precisely, were they fighting over? The right for Wojnarowicz’s essay to appear in the government-funded catalog unaltered, including a passage that proposed “dousing Jesse Helms in gasoline and burning him to death, and throwing [anti-gay congressman] William Dannemeyer off the Empire State Building,” and that labeled Cardinal John O’Connor, the archbishop of New York, a “fat fucking cannibal from that house of walking swastikas on fifth avenue.” The sophomorically toxic vitriol is revealing. In that moment, the Right pressed its case against provocative art based on traditional notions of artistic merit and public decency, especially in matters pertaining to sex. The Left rose in defense of an agglomeration of principles—free expression in First Amendment terms, the freedom of government agencies to operate with a degree of independence from the prerogatives of elected officials, and the individual freedom to express one’s sexuality without limit. Some adherents of what Butler calls “the left-wing project” stood up for the principle of free expression only to find that their adversaries were fighting for a whole way of life rooted in biblical religion. Others, recognizing this, advocated for a way of life rooted in sexual freedom—a freedom that was intersecting with civil rights, public health policy, and federally funded medical research due to the AIDS pandemic. It emerged that the Left, committed to free expression, was not so committed to the sexual freedom of Wojnarowicz, Sprinkle, et al. The cultural and artistic Left was “a fractured group of people fighting to survive and trying to find common cause with allies with whom they often disagreed and whom they often mistrusted.” Butler makes clear that the mistrust was mutual.

Seen from the present day, the episode is remarkable. For one thing, it’s hard to imagine the head of a federal arts agency paying a house call to a Downtown Manhattan gallery in search of rapprochement and good press. For another, it’s hard to imagine politicians, the media, and the public getting lathered up about art as such. Art has been subsumed by history and politics, as in the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the Smithsonian Institution regarding its presentation of the American history of slavery, among other topics.

Those differences tell against the assumption that the culture wars of the present are akin to those of the early nineties. Butler himself notes a key difference—that lately the wish to suppress free expression has been strong on the left as well as on the right. In the past decade, he contends, a “new bipartisan consensus” has emerged “in which principles of free speech and expression, particularly for artists, were no longer held to be of paramount importance. What mattered instead was using what institutional power you had to shape the discourse and control the range of acceptable opinions.”

In my view, the United States has never seen artistic free expression as a principle of paramount importance, and that principle has never enjoyed bipartisan support. And yet the change that Butler names is real and dramatic. The conflicts that are today called “the culture wars” involve neither the arts nor the principle of free expression to the degree that they did 40 years ago. The question, then, is why don’t they? And how did that moment shape this one? Did the Right’s campaign against federal arts funding weaken the arts, deter provocative artists from applying, and squelch the careers of those caught up in the controversies? Or were those artists (as the Right insisted) mainly provocateurs whose work didn’t have depth and staying power, such that their careers quickly ran their course? Why was the Left unable to organize and sustain community around free expression as a principle?

Any complex answer to those questions in this moment involves recognizing that circumstances have changed in crucial ways. One change is that, to a striking degree, creative figures who are situated on the cultural left are not personally engaged with religion. This change can be seen in the later chapters of The Perfect Moment, as sex, rather than sex and religion, becomes the subject of the art under consideration. Another is that the arts and popular culture—and free expression—have been made more and more subject to market forces, through the corporate merging of record labels, film studios, magazines, talent agencies, and the like. When Wildmon spooked Paramount and Gulf+Western into canceling The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese was able to take the picture to their rival Universal Studios, which provided fresh funding and distribution. Today, Universal and Paramount are owned by Comcast and Skydance, respectively, each of which controls an array of movie studios, cinemas, TV networks, and streaming services that are tied together financially and editorially, reducing competition. Today, Scorsese might have to shelve the picture or hold off trying to make it in the first place.

Another change involves the application of the schemas of victory and defeat to virtually every realm of public life. Since the 1980s, politics has taken on the character of sports. And politics and sports together, their contests broadcast around the clock by the mass media, have claimed cultural space and attention long occupied by the arts and other pastimes that aren’t oriented toward measurable outcomes such as wins and losses. The metaphor of “culture wars” is itself an expression of this: it represents polyhedral social conflicts as two-sided battles with clear adversaries who must wind up as either victors or vanquished. In that sense, it perpetuates some of the grim developments that Butler chronicles so vividly and perceptively.