Culture Wars Return: Isaac Butler's Book Traces the 1980s Playbook

On June 12, 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC cancelled The Perfect Moment, a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, before it opened. Critic and theater director Isaac Butler names his new book after that exhibition — and argues its story is running again, nearly four decades later.

The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars (Bloomsbury, 2026) chronicles the major battles over art in the 1980s and '90s. Its timing is deliberate. Butler, who did not live through the Reagan-era Culture Wars himself, began work after an alarming development in 2020: four major museums — the Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Gallery of Art — postponed a Philip Guston exhibition for fear that his paintings referencing the Ku Klux Klan might be misinterpreted by the public.

Against the current rise of right-wing legislators, politicians and organizations targeting arts and culture in the United States, Butler contends, the parallel story of the conservative players of the 1980s and '90s needs retelling.

Who were the players?

The book's cast includes figures whose tactics still shape cultural politics. Reverend Donald Wildmon pioneered mass mailing to Christians through his National Federation for Decency, and used it to make Martin Scorsese's production of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) difficult — the episode Butler treats as a defining case.

Wildmon reappears in the story of Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a beaker of the artist's own urine. In 1989, then-Senator Alfonse D'Amato ripped a reproduction of a catalog image of the work in half on the Senate floor.

Then came the Corcoran. By the mid-1980s, Mapplethorpe's AIDS diagnosis had become common knowledge. The Perfect Moment had traveled nationally, but its depiction of sadomasochism, Black nude models, and naked children was likely to provoke a reaction in Washington. The museum pulled the plug first. In the aftermath, Senator Jesse Helms and Democratic Congressman Sidney Yates of Illinois fought over the funding of the National Endowment for the Arts itself.

What does this change for art institutions?

Butler provides, by his account, a balanced record of how both sides strategized and implemented their ambitions. The relevance for today's museums is direct: the Guston postponements of 2020 showed institutions preemptively withdrawing from controversy — the Corcoran's move in miniature.

The earlier era reached beyond headline exhibitions. The Morality Action Committee wrote postcards to legislators across the country claiming that Franklin Furnace, the arts organization founded 50 years ago by the essay's author, had shown pornography to 500 children per day during Carnival Knowledge, its exhibition of women artists exploring sexuality. The claim was false, but the postcards kept coming.

What the book documents, in short, is a repeatable method: targeted outrage, legislative pressure, and institutional retreat. Whether today's museums break that cycle or repeat it is the question Butler's history now puts before them.