The Perfect Moment
God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars
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The Perfect Moment
Letto da:
Isaac Butler
Acquista ora a 16,80 €
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Letto da:
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Isaac Butler
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Di:
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Isaac Butler
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
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Recensioni della critica
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.
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.
This country has always had culture wars, but 1988 was the year everything broke open. Isaac Butler’s new book looks at an era of AIDS activism, artistic expression, and an ascendent religious right . . . The Perfect Moment ably and passionately underscores the legacy of the First Amendment, cornerstone of our Bill of Rights, besieged now as never before.
Isaac Butler is one of the pre-eminent writers covering pop cultural history right now. His latest book takes on an essential subject: the moment in the 1980s when art and politics collided in the U.S., changing the way both would be perceived in the decades that followed.
With his deft and thoughtful study, Butler demonstrates that the inorganic, often orchestrated battles that edgy works of art provoked could operate as a parable about Middle America’s manipulation by the religious right—and the cowardice of institutional liberalism in standing up against these outrages . . . The Perfect Moment offers crucial insights into contemporary crises in American politics and much longer-standing cultural failures.
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