A New Book Revisits the ’80s Culture Wars, and Today’s Fight

Franklin Furnace founder Martha Wilson, who lived through the Reagan-era Culture Wars, is recommending a new book she says maps closely onto the pressure artists face right now. The book is Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, published in 2026, and the recommendation came in a piece for Hyperallergic.

The argument is personal. Franklin Furnace, the arts organization the writer founded 50 years ago, was itself a target. According to the Hyperallergic piece, the Morality Action Committee mailed postcards to legislators across the country claiming the organization had shown pornography to 500 children per day during its Carnival Knowledge exhibition of women artists exploring sexuality.

Butler, a critic and theater director, is younger than the writer and did not live through that era. What pushed him toward the subject, per the review, was 2020, when an exhibition of Philip Guston’s work was postponed by the Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. The institutions feared the public might misread Guston’s paintings that reference the Ku Klux Klan. Against the current rise of right-wing legislators, politicians and organizations targeting arts and culture, the review says, the story of the conservative players of the 1980s and ’90s needs telling.

The book walks through the flashpoints of that period. One is the trouble Martin Scorsese had producing The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, which the review attributes primarily to Reverend Donald Wildmon’s innovation of mass mailing to Christians on behalf of his National Federation for Decency. Wildmon surfaces again in the book’s treatment of Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph “Piss Christ,” a plastic crucifix in a beaker of the artist’s urine. In 1989, then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato ripped a reproduction of a catalog image of the work in half on the Senate floor.

The title comes from the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective The Perfect Moment. By the mid-1980s, Mapplethorpe’s AIDS diagnosis had become common knowledge. The show had already traveled the country, but its depictions of sadomasochism, Black nude models and naked children were likely to provoke a reaction in Washington. On June 12, 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC canceled the exhibition before it opened.

The cancellation set off a fight over the funding of the National Endowment for the Arts itself, with Senator Jesse Helms on one side and Sidney Yates, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, on the other. According to the review, Butler offers a balanced account of how both sides strategized and carried out their aims.

For New Yorkers in the arts world, the throughline the review draws is plain: the tactics of 1989, from mass mailings to funding threats to institutions folding before a show opens, look familiar. The Guston postponements in 2020 are the review’s example of an institution retreating on its own. Wilson’s pitch is that Butler’s book supplies the history for anyone trying to understand, and defend against, the current push on creative expression.