How a Mapplethorpe show became a blueprint for the culture wars
A photography retrospective, a federal arts grant, and a wave of political outrage helped define one of the most consequential fights in late 20th-century American culture. Isaac Butler’s new book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, returns to that moment with the benefit of hindsight — and with a clear argument that the conflict over art funding never really ended.
The book centers on Robert Mapplethorpe’s touring retrospective, The Perfect Moment, which had already traveled to Philadelphia and Chicago before arriving in Washington, DC, in the summer of 1989. Once conservative politicians learned that the National Endowment for the Arts had supported the exhibition with a $30,000 grant, the show became a national flashpoint. The Corcoran Gallery canceled it under pressure, and the Washington Project for the Arts stepped in to present it, where it drew strong attention and acclaim.
Butler uses that episode as an entry point into a wider history of censorship, obscenity politics, and public funding. He also examines Andres Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ) (1987), the NEA Four — Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes — and the legal and institutional fallout that followed. In 1990, the four performance artists saw their grant applications rejected over risqué subject matter, then took the matter to the US Supreme Court. The NEA ultimately responded by stopping support for individual artists altogether.
The book also reaches beyond the 1980s and 1990s. Butler says the delayed Philip Guston retrospective in 2020 sharpened his interest in what he sees as a liberal form of self-censorship, while Florida’s HB 1557, known as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, and Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election made the project feel newly urgent as he was researching and writing it.
For Butler, the subject is personal as well as historical. Raised in Washington, DC, he witnessed the era’s cultural battles firsthand, and he describes the NEA as one of the great achievements of postwar America. His book suggests that the arguments surrounding Mapplethorpe, Guston, and the NEA Four are not isolated episodes, but part of a longer struggle over who gets to decide what public support for art should mean.
