Paul Elie reviews Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars — a book that tracks three iconic cultural battles: the campaign against Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the furor over Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, and the Mapplethorpe photography controversies that brought down the NEA’s house of cards. But Elie’s review is really about what made that era different from ours.
What characterized the late-80s culture wars was not just ideology. It was that art itself still mattered.
- Politicians, the media, and the public got genuinely lathered up about what government-funded art should look like — not just as a political football, but as a cultural question
- John Frohnmayer, the NEA chair, personally visited a Downtown Manhattan gallery seeking rapprochement with artists who had just told him to resign
- Scorsese’s Last Temptation, canceled by Paramount after pressure from Donald Wildmon, was picked up by Universal — a level of competition between studios that corporate consolidation has all but erased
Elie identifies a “new bipartisan consensus”: both left and right now prioritize shaping discourse and controlling acceptable opinions over defending free expression. The arts have been subsumed by the market and by politics-as-sports. The metaphor of “culture wars” itself perpetuates the binary — it represents “polyhedral social conflicts as two-sided battles with clear adversaries who must wind up as either victors or vanquished.”
If you want to understand how we got from a time when an NEA chair cared what artists thought to a time when a president pressures the Smithsonian over slavery exhibits — this book and this review are the map.