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The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars
The prize-winning author of The Method reveals the forgotten origins of America's culture wars-a story of late 20th century art vs. censorship, brimming with intense drama and fierce moral urgency.
It's 1988, the final year of the Reagan presidency, and the curtain is closing on the Cold War. In the absence of external adversaries, the American public is on the precipice of war with itself. The religious right, newly ascendant and emboldened, is determined to seize control of America's future. And the first battles will be fought over, of all things, contemporary art.
In The Perfect Moment, cultural historian Isaac Butler reexamines this pivotal, misunderstood American era. Archconservatives like Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, and Pat Robertson fixed their sights on artists including Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and Karen Finley, capitalizing on the provocative politics of their work to stir a nascent evangelical coalition into moral panic. It was at this moment, Butler argues, that the far right perfected the tactics it still uses today to whip its base into frenzy-from banning books and sanitizing American history, to spreading medical misinformation. All too relevant today, The Perfect Moment is an incisive and meticulously researched account of this crucial period and a stirring ode to the power of the creative spirit.
It's 1988, the final year of the Reagan presidency, and the curtain is closing on the Cold War. In the absence of external adversaries, the American public is on the precipice of war with itself. The religious right, newly ascendant and emboldened, is determined to seize control of America's future. And the first battles will be fought over, of all things, contemporary art.
In The Perfect Moment, cultural historian Isaac Butler reexamines this pivotal, misunderstood American era. Archconservatives like Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, and Pat Robertson fixed their sights on artists including Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and Karen Finley, capitalizing on the provocative politics of their work to stir a nascent evangelical coalition into moral panic. It was at this moment, Butler argues, that the far right perfected the tactics it still uses today to whip its base into frenzy-from banning books and sanitizing American history, to spreading medical misinformation. All too relevant today, The Perfect Moment is an incisive and meticulously researched account of this crucial period and a stirring ode to the power of the creative spirit.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published June 23, 2026
About the author
Isaac Butler
8 books39 followersIsaac Butler is the author of the NBCC Award winner The Method and the coauthor of The World Only Spins Forward. Butler’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Slate, American Theatre, and more. For Slate, he created and hosted Lend Me Your Ears, a podcast about Shakespeare and politics, and Working, a podcast about the creative process. He is the co-creator of Real Enemies, a multimedia exploration of conspiracy theories in the American psyche. Butler holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Minnesota and teaches theater history and performance at the New School, NYU, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
American exceptionalism is only surpassed by American inability to understand what makes it exceptional.
The names here: Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Wojarowicz are more familiar for their work than their work is familiar. Or the context in which that work arose. This book is a fix to that, telling the story of a set of controversial art exhibits and the local and national controversies that attached.
What sets this book apart from other similar books I have reviewed is the role of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the government entity that ended up at the center of the political discussion of this sort of first entity in the culture war. Having an entity like the NEA at the center of the debate allows the book to operate as more of a procedural history of the agency: its creation and the struggle that exists at the core of its mission to both support the public at large and to support artists who lack public support. In the other books, the need of the authors to make a ‘Same as it Ever Was’ claim forced them into tenuous or unhelpful narratives. This book does not need to make such a broad claim. The point of continuity exists, it only needs to be explained.
And the explanation is something else. The NEA, and particularly its administrators, operate as a sort of anti-hero to the book. They are trying to serve at least three masters. They inevitably fail, but their failures are instructive and justify the price of admission. The stories of the artists here are also useful in getting to hear more of the real person behind the work, which always leads to unique twists. Even the villains here (with two exceptions) end up more motivated by pedestrian concerns than the contemporary grifters who carry the banner.
The author also has a firm grasp of the right level of personalization. There is a bit of a conceit here of a stage play (based on the author’s own point of interface with these creatives) that reaches a genius level on lighting upon the Supreme Court, but never interferes with letting the subjects be the focus.
If there is a flaw here, it is that, much like the art in question, the temptation to focus on the sexy bits can overwhelm the casual take. The temptation is real to center this as a matter of culture war. There is much more to this history than that. The book will be sold as being relevant to the modern GOP, but the story here is that of the creation of the modern DNC.
My thanks to the author, Issac Butler, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.
The names here: Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Wojarowicz are more familiar for their work than their work is familiar. Or the context in which that work arose. This book is a fix to that, telling the story of a set of controversial art exhibits and the local and national controversies that attached.
What sets this book apart from other similar books I have reviewed is the role of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the government entity that ended up at the center of the political discussion of this sort of first entity in the culture war. Having an entity like the NEA at the center of the debate allows the book to operate as more of a procedural history of the agency: its creation and the struggle that exists at the core of its mission to both support the public at large and to support artists who lack public support. In the other books, the need of the authors to make a ‘Same as it Ever Was’ claim forced them into tenuous or unhelpful narratives. This book does not need to make such a broad claim. The point of continuity exists, it only needs to be explained.
And the explanation is something else. The NEA, and particularly its administrators, operate as a sort of anti-hero to the book. They are trying to serve at least three masters. They inevitably fail, but their failures are instructive and justify the price of admission. The stories of the artists here are also useful in getting to hear more of the real person behind the work, which always leads to unique twists. Even the villains here (with two exceptions) end up more motivated by pedestrian concerns than the contemporary grifters who carry the banner.
The author also has a firm grasp of the right level of personalization. There is a bit of a conceit here of a stage play (based on the author’s own point of interface with these creatives) that reaches a genius level on lighting upon the Supreme Court, but never interferes with letting the subjects be the focus.
If there is a flaw here, it is that, much like the art in question, the temptation to focus on the sexy bits can overwhelm the casual take. The temptation is real to center this as a matter of culture war. There is much more to this history than that. The book will be sold as being relevant to the modern GOP, but the story here is that of the creation of the modern DNC.
My thanks to the author, Issac Butler, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Not nearly as strong as The Method, maybe because its narrative is too familiar and recent—and still in progress.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews