Art, Outrage and How the Culture Wars Began

In April 1989, a newspaper clipping about an art exhibit landed in the mailbox of the Rev. Donald Wildmon, the founder of a conservative evangelical group, the American Family Association.

Partly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the exhibit included a now-infamous photograph by Andres Serrano that showed a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s own urine. Incensed, Wildmon sent a copy of the photo to every member of Congress, setting off a battle led by the Christian right over what contemporary art could be and who should receive federal funding for it.

Isaac Butler, an author and cultural historian, walks through this and other pivotal moments in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s in his new book, “The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars.”

Butler spoke to the Book Review’s editor, Gilbert Cruz, about how these fights unfolded and what they meant for the artists themselves. He sat down to write the book, he said, when “it really felt like the culture wars of the ’80s and ’90s that I grew up in were repeating again.”

Books and plays discussed on this episode:

“The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars,” by Isaac Butler

“Measure for Measure,” by William Shakespeare

“Transgressions: The Offences of Art,” by Anthony Julius

“It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic,” by Jack Lowery

“The Devil Finds Work,” by James Baldwin

“Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz,” by Cynthia Carr

“Elia Kazan: A Life,” by Elia Kazan

“Fear No Pharaoh: American Jews, the Civil War and the Fight to End Slavery,” by Richard Kreitner

“The Kindness of Strangers,” by Salka Viertel

“The Talmud: A Biography,” by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer

“My Last Sigh,” by Luis Buñuel

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