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The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars
A New Yorker Best Book of 2026 So Far
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.
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.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published June 23, 2026
About the author
Isaac Butler
8 books40 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 - 18 of 18 reviews
July 17, 2026
I picked this one up because I was interested in its nominal subject, the war over National Endowment for the Arts grants in the early 90s, and it’s an excellent history of that, but far more than that it’s an elegy for the idea that it’s a public good to subsidize art, even if we don’t quite get it, and an open ended question about how the world today might be different if we’d kept that spirit alive
August 29, 2026
Page xiv - my edition
Art is often where the unspoken goes to be said, and where the hidden tensions of a society are enacted.
This book is about the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), responsible for (or was – if Trump has already eliminated it?) giving grants to artists and artist groups across the U.S. Its purpose is to promote the growth of art as neutrally as possible, because private donations can have stipulations or parameters attached to the art they fund. By the arts, is meant the vast panoply ranging from paintings, sculpture, music, theater, dance, photography…
Page 250 original funding language of the NEA
It is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry, but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.
The NEA was created in 1965 under the Lyndon Johnson administration. Government funded art projects started with Franklin Roosevelt during the depression in the 1930s, not only to provide work for artists but also to enhance society as a whole.
The right-wing of America was opposed to these subsidies which started with Roosevelt. They did not approve of government subsidies; seeing them as an infringement on the free market, libertarian values, and government intrusion. The Christian right allied with this movement during the 1970s as part of their goal of making the U.S. a Christian nation. They wanted a return of school prayer and biblical studies. The Christian right opposed abortion, sex education in schools, and gay marriage. Private Christian schools were set-up to prevent having their children from attending racially integrated classrooms after Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional during the 1950s and 1960s.
The Christian right-wing (among other targets) focused on the NEA, more so on the money it was giving to “fringe” artists. Many of the grants under scrutiny by the various Christian right organizations were in large metropolitan cities like New York and Los Angeles. This also exemplifies the urban-rural divide in the U.S.
Their rage extended to Anders Serrano, who made “Piss Christ” in the 1980s. The title alone made it an extra-large target. Then there was a retrospective of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, sponsored in part by NEA grants to museums. Among the many Mapplethorpe pictures on display were a few with explicit BDSM themes.
The author explains the tactics used by right-wing Christians. Anders Serrano only got a grant of a few thousand dollars, but those in government, like Senator Jesse Helms, spent hour upon hour pontificating on the sinfulness and depravity of the federal government in promoting this art. Helms mailed thousands (this was before the internet) by postal mail, at government expense, of examples of Mapplethorpe’s pictures to Christian organizations—so they’d be convinced to join his crusade. Helms spent loads more time looking at and displaying those pictures than the average museum visitor did at the Mapplethorpe exhibition.
The Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C. was pressured into cancelling the Mapplethorpe exhibition because Helms and several other government officials dedicated much of their time to attacking the NEA for allowing grants to “controversial” artists. Not only that, but they lied and misrepresented much of the work of the artists under scrutiny.
Page xv
Who gets to define freedom, and does everyone’s freedom get to count?
The author explains how under all this pressure the NEA and its directors started to cave in. New ambiguous clauses were inserted into the grant process. Transgressive art became not only problematic, but also taboo.
Page 49 Jacob Neusner
“[impose] a rule that no Federal funds are to be used to support art that violates the canons of public decency, including, after all, respect for the religions of diverse groups of Americans.”
Helms would embrace this idea and attempt to make it the law of the land.
This is an indication of the way a strong and vocal group in the United States was heading.
As the author states (page 244) the NEA became the National Endowment for Nice Art. It moved away from the city to country-folksy-art.
Also, the liberal mindset of the NEA and museum directors had no clue of what they were dealing with in the coming collision, which later became known as the “culture wars,” with right-wing Christianity. They were in a silo, accustomed to having civil conversations—this was not to be with the Christian right.
Page xxx mid-1970s
For liberal America, the conservative unrest was… the sharp, sudden discovery that a new opponent exists, and they are far better organized and better equipped than you would prefer.
We see the results of this today. The attack on the NEA was just part of a right-wing movement to Christianize America and remove government and its regulations from the marketplace. In other words, government had no business in handing out grants to the artistic community—or to any community, whether it be national parks, environmental groups, foreign aid institutes, universities, health and science research, plus many more.
Art is often where the unspoken goes to be said, and where the hidden tensions of a society are enacted.
This book is about the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), responsible for (or was – if Trump has already eliminated it?) giving grants to artists and artist groups across the U.S. Its purpose is to promote the growth of art as neutrally as possible, because private donations can have stipulations or parameters attached to the art they fund. By the arts, is meant the vast panoply ranging from paintings, sculpture, music, theater, dance, photography…
Page 250 original funding language of the NEA
It is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry, but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.
The NEA was created in 1965 under the Lyndon Johnson administration. Government funded art projects started with Franklin Roosevelt during the depression in the 1930s, not only to provide work for artists but also to enhance society as a whole.
The right-wing of America was opposed to these subsidies which started with Roosevelt. They did not approve of government subsidies; seeing them as an infringement on the free market, libertarian values, and government intrusion. The Christian right allied with this movement during the 1970s as part of their goal of making the U.S. a Christian nation. They wanted a return of school prayer and biblical studies. The Christian right opposed abortion, sex education in schools, and gay marriage. Private Christian schools were set-up to prevent having their children from attending racially integrated classrooms after Jim Crow laws were declared unconstitutional during the 1950s and 1960s.
The Christian right-wing (among other targets) focused on the NEA, more so on the money it was giving to “fringe” artists. Many of the grants under scrutiny by the various Christian right organizations were in large metropolitan cities like New York and Los Angeles. This also exemplifies the urban-rural divide in the U.S.
Their rage extended to Anders Serrano, who made “Piss Christ” in the 1980s. The title alone made it an extra-large target. Then there was a retrospective of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, sponsored in part by NEA grants to museums. Among the many Mapplethorpe pictures on display were a few with explicit BDSM themes.
The author explains the tactics used by right-wing Christians. Anders Serrano only got a grant of a few thousand dollars, but those in government, like Senator Jesse Helms, spent hour upon hour pontificating on the sinfulness and depravity of the federal government in promoting this art. Helms mailed thousands (this was before the internet) by postal mail, at government expense, of examples of Mapplethorpe’s pictures to Christian organizations—so they’d be convinced to join his crusade. Helms spent loads more time looking at and displaying those pictures than the average museum visitor did at the Mapplethorpe exhibition.
The Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C. was pressured into cancelling the Mapplethorpe exhibition because Helms and several other government officials dedicated much of their time to attacking the NEA for allowing grants to “controversial” artists. Not only that, but they lied and misrepresented much of the work of the artists under scrutiny.
Page xv
Who gets to define freedom, and does everyone’s freedom get to count?
The author explains how under all this pressure the NEA and its directors started to cave in. New ambiguous clauses were inserted into the grant process. Transgressive art became not only problematic, but also taboo.
Page 49 Jacob Neusner
“[impose] a rule that no Federal funds are to be used to support art that violates the canons of public decency, including, after all, respect for the religions of diverse groups of Americans.”
Helms would embrace this idea and attempt to make it the law of the land.
This is an indication of the way a strong and vocal group in the United States was heading.
As the author states (page 244) the NEA became the National Endowment for Nice Art. It moved away from the city to country-folksy-art.
Also, the liberal mindset of the NEA and museum directors had no clue of what they were dealing with in the coming collision, which later became known as the “culture wars,” with right-wing Christianity. They were in a silo, accustomed to having civil conversations—this was not to be with the Christian right.
Page xxx mid-1970s
For liberal America, the conservative unrest was… the sharp, sudden discovery that a new opponent exists, and they are far better organized and better equipped than you would prefer.
We see the results of this today. The attack on the NEA was just part of a right-wing movement to Christianize America and remove government and its regulations from the marketplace. In other words, government had no business in handing out grants to the artistic community—or to any community, whether it be national parks, environmental groups, foreign aid institutes, universities, health and science research, plus many more.
September 17, 2026
A humbling observation that my best self can abide is that the political rancor across every domain of American life has less to do with character deficiencies than with the information environments we exist in.
I wish it were my own observation, but it’s one I came across from Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark—but it’s that gentle reminder that we do not share the same stream of facts, conversations, artwork, and culture. Rewinding the tape 30 or 40 years ago, the brewing culture wars were tug-of-wars about cultural artifacts because of the shared reality. We can imagine the school board rooms in pitched conversations about reading materials, ire over movies about a historical Jesus, and feeling strong feelings about art that challenged sacredness, attempted subversion, and extolled self-expression.
"The Perfect Moment" sees Butler widening the scope of his writing from theater and acting to the wider culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Starting his story with the Kanawha County Textbook War, Butler looks at the embattled artists, politicians, and cultural artifacts that informed this larger war between movement conservatism and the progressive left. Whether it’s Scorsese’s *The Last Temptation of Christ*, Andres Serrano’s "Piss Christ" painting, 2 Live Crew’s raucous, salacious anthems, or the scorched-earth artistry/performance art of the ACT UP and LGBT activists, we sense there was a shared core of identity to battle over American identity. The legal battles are varied, but often are about the limits of the First Amendment to protect free expression. From the Comstock Act to the literary works challenging acceptable literary merit (Joyce, Miller, Lawrence), the permissibility and obscenity standards were challenged. The wider cultural battle, often centered here around the allocation of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), reveals the winnowing acceptability of transgressive arts and a wider clampdown of cultural conservatism against LGBT-related artwork.
One of the strengths of the book is that Butler explores the complications of art itself. Given the post-WW2 effort to portray America as the virtuous colossus of freedom and individual rights, how much of the government funding of the arts, including the abstract art movement, stem from America’s Cold War propaganda efforts. The exploration of feminism and transgressive body politics ran afoul of anti-porn feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon—some early strands of a puritan leftism that is more recognizable in the cancel-culture/woke social media battles some 30 years later. The tenuous and fragile alliances between museum curators and artists, often severed when government funding was threatened, and other times renewed with shared purpose, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibit at the CAC.
Though belief in government wavered, belief in the arts continued, and shocking new modes of self-expression continued well into the 1990s. From the archly New Pop sensibilities of Jeff Koons to the provocative British upstarts like playwright Sarah Kane and filmmaker Danny Boyle, transgressive arts were still provoking barriers of censorship. Though they did not have mainstream success at the time, there were theater artists having seismic shifts. I couldn’t help but think of Tracy Letts’s brilliant Shepardian *Killer Joe*, and the exploration of fringe conspiratorial anti-institutionalism with *Bug* (1996). John Cameron Mitchell’s *Hedwig and the Angry Inch* is another example- joyously mixes musical bops with transgression and titillating joy.
The frightening proposition for our time is that we may be living in the post-thought era. As Hannah Arendt warned us on the dangers of fascism - "there are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous". So how to push back when we seem at the precipice of a new dark age. An era where technocratic values flatten humanistic ones. Where artificial generation replaces thought. Tribal hatreds replace civil discourse. The callous attacks on empathy and reality by the dangerously inept Trump administration seems to have revealed that split between conservatism and a cult of an imagined past.
If there is a way out, it will be from us, perceiving differently, asking different questions, living out lives of purpose and meaning, and moving toward the unknown. Whether it’s scribbled on Post-it notes or gallery walls, the human project continues in all its various expressions, in movement and thought, in patterns of beautiful transformation.
I wish it were my own observation, but it’s one I came across from Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark—but it’s that gentle reminder that we do not share the same stream of facts, conversations, artwork, and culture. Rewinding the tape 30 or 40 years ago, the brewing culture wars were tug-of-wars about cultural artifacts because of the shared reality. We can imagine the school board rooms in pitched conversations about reading materials, ire over movies about a historical Jesus, and feeling strong feelings about art that challenged sacredness, attempted subversion, and extolled self-expression.
"The Perfect Moment" sees Butler widening the scope of his writing from theater and acting to the wider culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Starting his story with the Kanawha County Textbook War, Butler looks at the embattled artists, politicians, and cultural artifacts that informed this larger war between movement conservatism and the progressive left. Whether it’s Scorsese’s *The Last Temptation of Christ*, Andres Serrano’s "Piss Christ" painting, 2 Live Crew’s raucous, salacious anthems, or the scorched-earth artistry/performance art of the ACT UP and LGBT activists, we sense there was a shared core of identity to battle over American identity. The legal battles are varied, but often are about the limits of the First Amendment to protect free expression. From the Comstock Act to the literary works challenging acceptable literary merit (Joyce, Miller, Lawrence), the permissibility and obscenity standards were challenged. The wider cultural battle, often centered here around the allocation of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), reveals the winnowing acceptability of transgressive arts and a wider clampdown of cultural conservatism against LGBT-related artwork.
One of the strengths of the book is that Butler explores the complications of art itself. Given the post-WW2 effort to portray America as the virtuous colossus of freedom and individual rights, how much of the government funding of the arts, including the abstract art movement, stem from America’s Cold War propaganda efforts. The exploration of feminism and transgressive body politics ran afoul of anti-porn feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon—some early strands of a puritan leftism that is more recognizable in the cancel-culture/woke social media battles some 30 years later. The tenuous and fragile alliances between museum curators and artists, often severed when government funding was threatened, and other times renewed with shared purpose, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s exhibit at the CAC.
Though belief in government wavered, belief in the arts continued, and shocking new modes of self-expression continued well into the 1990s. From the archly New Pop sensibilities of Jeff Koons to the provocative British upstarts like playwright Sarah Kane and filmmaker Danny Boyle, transgressive arts were still provoking barriers of censorship. Though they did not have mainstream success at the time, there were theater artists having seismic shifts. I couldn’t help but think of Tracy Letts’s brilliant Shepardian *Killer Joe*, and the exploration of fringe conspiratorial anti-institutionalism with *Bug* (1996). John Cameron Mitchell’s *Hedwig and the Angry Inch* is another example- joyously mixes musical bops with transgression and titillating joy.
The frightening proposition for our time is that we may be living in the post-thought era. As Hannah Arendt warned us on the dangers of fascism - "there are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous". So how to push back when we seem at the precipice of a new dark age. An era where technocratic values flatten humanistic ones. Where artificial generation replaces thought. Tribal hatreds replace civil discourse. The callous attacks on empathy and reality by the dangerously inept Trump administration seems to have revealed that split between conservatism and a cult of an imagined past.
If there is a way out, it will be from us, perceiving differently, asking different questions, living out lives of purpose and meaning, and moving toward the unknown. Whether it’s scribbled on Post-it notes or gallery walls, the human project continues in all its various expressions, in movement and thought, in patterns of beautiful transformation.
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.
July 27, 2026
I used to work in the world of (primarily) Contemporary and Modern art, where the works were often controversial, but most of the time, the controversial works were good - very good and worthy of whatever funding/praise/celebration they were given.
I was working at a museum that was hosting a show of works that were eventually to be promised gifts to the museum from a loyal and wealthy donor that also rented the space to a large corporate party. The corporation asked that we remove the Annie Sprinkle piece from the wall, which turned into a huge argument among staff and administration - if this (truly hilarous) piece was removed, what was next? Can the corporation who is paying to rent the space for a party have a say in what is worthy of hanging on the walls of a museum, or what is appropriate for people to view at all? Ultimately, the pieces came down for their party, but remained on view for the rest of the show, but it showed me how easy the triggers of obscenity can be tripped.
Isaac Butler did a great job highlighting the artists that faced the wrath particularly of the religious right in the 80s and 90s - Andreas Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, Ron Athey, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley and others. He talked about the rise of the culture wars in context of what else was happening at the time, and showed how the NEA has been perpetually scrutinized and cut since then.
This is the kind of stuff I particularly nerd out over.
I was working at a museum that was hosting a show of works that were eventually to be promised gifts to the museum from a loyal and wealthy donor that also rented the space to a large corporate party. The corporation asked that we remove the Annie Sprinkle piece from the wall, which turned into a huge argument among staff and administration - if this (truly hilarous) piece was removed, what was next? Can the corporation who is paying to rent the space for a party have a say in what is worthy of hanging on the walls of a museum, or what is appropriate for people to view at all? Ultimately, the pieces came down for their party, but remained on view for the rest of the show, but it showed me how easy the triggers of obscenity can be tripped.
Isaac Butler did a great job highlighting the artists that faced the wrath particularly of the religious right in the 80s and 90s - Andreas Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, Ron Athey, Annie Sprinkle, Karen Finley and others. He talked about the rise of the culture wars in context of what else was happening at the time, and showed how the NEA has been perpetually scrutinized and cut since then.
This is the kind of stuff I particularly nerd out over.
August 4, 2026
A very good history of the classic culture war battles of the 1980s and 90s. All of your favorite puritain pearl clutchers are here, Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, Ronald Reagan, Rudolph Guiliani as well as the artists who pushed the envelope: Andres Sarrano, Robert Maplethorpe, Chris Ophili and the prominent politicians, curators and NEA leaders of the era. It’s an epic battle that still goes on today. In fact, comparing those skirmishes to today’s tragicomic scene has me more than a little nostalgic.
August 17, 2026
Absolutely dense read, but my goodness do I feel so much more informed. A balancing act between defeat and hopefulness. Completely well done by Butler. Wow.
“While no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.”
— language from the founding of the NEA. Mhm.
“While no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.”
— language from the founding of the NEA. Mhm.
September 5, 2026
the title of this book is a bit misleading as this is really a history of the birth and subsequent battles over the national endowment for the arts, but i appreciate the need for something sexier than that--at any rate, butler is really brilliant when it comes to tracing the histories and significance of unusual subjects (stanislavski's method, the NEA, angels in america) in a somewhat biographical form and i will read anything he writes
July 15, 2026
A rollicking fascinating and frustrating history of the American Family Association, Robert Maplethorpe, ACTUP, and various other artists and antagonists who birther the culture wars of the late 1980s.
July 19, 2026
This is an angry book, filled with frustration over the debate for public funding over controversial works of art. At its heart, it exemplifies that so much of the furor boils down to the idea of "free speech for me, but not for thee."
August 5, 2026
One of the best history books of the year, insightfully and eloquently reframing our modern divides as mere extensions of the culture wars that conservatives launched long ago. The audiobook is worth it for Butler's (strikingly accurate) George H. W. Bush impression alone.
Did Not Finish
September 26, 2026valuable, well-researched work, though i ultimately gave up due to its density and my own lack of pre-existing familiarity with most of the us american cultural-political landscape making this a frustrating read. mea culpa!
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.
July 26, 2026
Very timely exploration of 1980s culture wars.
August 19, 2026
Two words: Piss Christ.
August 26, 2026
Too many backwards conservative idiots in America to sustain publicly funded art. Seems nice while it lasted, though.
August 8, 2026
Daddy, what did you do I the culture wars?
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews