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The Perfect Moment

God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars
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The Perfect Moment

Von: Isaac Butler
Gesprochen von: Isaac Butler
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The prize-winning author of The Method reveals the forgotten origins of America’s culture wars—a story of late 20th century art vs. censorship, brimming with intense drama and fierce moral urgency.

It’s 1988, the final year of the Reagan presidency, and the curtain is closing on the Cold War. In the absence of external adversaries, the American public is on the precipice of war with itself. The religious right, newly ascendant and emboldened, is determined to seize control of America’s future. And the first battles will be fought over, of all things, contemporary art.

In The Perfect Moment, cultural historian Isaac Butler reexamines this pivotal, misunderstood American era. Archconservatives like Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, and Pat Robertson fixed their sights on artists including Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, and Karen Finley, capitalizing on the provocative politics of their work to stir a nascent evangelical coalition into moral panic. It was at this moment, Butler argues, that the far right perfected the tactics it still uses today to whip its base into frenzy—from banning books and sanitizing American history, to spreading medical misinformation. All too relevant today, The Perfect Moment is an incisive and meticulously researched account of this crucial period and a stirring ode to the power of the creative spirit.©2026 Isaac Butler (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Kunst Nord-, Mittel- & Südamerika Philosophie
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Kritikerstimmen

Critic and historian Butler offers a comprehensive overview of the religious right’s targeting of artists and arts funding in the 1980s and ’90s . . . Throughout, Butler incisively highlights the spiraling damage inflicted by the tepid responses of arts supporters like NEA chairman John Frohnmayer, who, desperate to protect the Endowment, agreed to diminish artists’ freedom of expression, and of the liberal establishment as a whole, which squeamishly demurred from defending works . . . [The Perfect Moment] makes for a dramatic retelling of a sea change in American arts and politics.
An absorbing autopsy of America’s first culture wars. . . Butler recasts the battles for artistic freedom of speech fought in the late-20th century, “the World War I of American arts and letters,” as a sobering prelude to today’s gloves-off assault on the arts. . . A richly detailed genealogy of the continuing battle for artistic freedom in the U.S.
Butler, director, podcaster, and author of The Method, traces this fraught era from a fight over textbooks in West Virginia in 1974 to the end of the twentieth century and beyond . . . Butler's insights into the end of the Cold War and the AIDS crisis, interviews with many of those involved, and excerpts from critical analysis of art pieces round out this freshly relevant exploration of a pivotal time for the arts in America.
Butler ignites an urgent signal flare, illuminating how decades of coordinated efforts to stifle free expression snowballed into our present moment. Scrupulously researched and blissfully told, this gonzo history of American art and attrition proves that Butler is one of the most exciting writers of non-fiction today.
An engaging and deeply researched book that deftly maps the far right’s attack on art and free speech in the 80s and 90s to the current day. The antagonistic players may have changed, but their tactics remain the same. Butler’s storytelling is as strong as his reporting, showing us that while we can’t undo the past, we can learn from it and reshape our future.
With dozens of incisive portraits wound within a swiftly moving central narrative, Isaac Butler illuminates one of the most important histories of the past sixty years: the struggles for meaning and identity in American culture and politics. It’s essential reading for followers of art history, political history or cultural criticism. The Perfect Moment helps us understand the forces that roil our present fractured moment and why the arts remain essential in defining American society.
Isaac Butler is the Ernie Pyle of the 1980s culture wars, and The Perfect Moment is a clear-eyed chronicle of the skirmishes, sorties, and struggles that have made up the conservative movement's all-out war on art--and artists--in America.
Entertaining and illuminating.
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