The Perfect Moment:
God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars
by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury)
The names here: Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Wojarowicz are more familiar for their work than their work is familiar. Or the context in which that work arose. This book is a fix to that, telling the story of a set of controversial art exhibits and the local and national controversies that attached.
What sets this book apart from other similar books I have reviewed is the role of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the government entity that ended up at the center of the political discussion of this sort of first entity in the culture war. Having an entity like the NEA at the center of the debate allows the book to operate as more of a procedural history of the agency: its creation and the struggle that exists at the core of its mission to both support the public at large and to support artists who lack public support. In the other books, the need of the authors to make a ‘Same as it Ever Was’ claim forced them into tenuous or unhelpful narratives. This book does not need to make such a broad claim. The point of continuity exists, it only needs to be explained.
And the explanation is something else. The NEA, and particularly its administrators, operate as a sort of anti-hero to the book. They are trying to serve at least three masters. They inevitably fail, but their failures are instructive and justify the price of admission. The stories of the artists here are also useful in getting to hear more of the real person behind the work, which always leads to unique twists. Even the villains here (with two exceptions) end up more motivated by pedestrian concerns than the contemporary grifters who carry the banner.
The author also has a firm grasp of the right level of personalization. There is a bit of a conceit here of a stage play (based on the author’s own point of interface with these creatives) that reaches a genius level on lighting upon the Supreme Court, but never interferes with letting the subjects be the focus.
If there is a flaw here, it is that, much like the art in question, the temptation to focus on the sexy bits can overwhelm the casual take. The temptation is real to center this as a matter of culture war. There is much more to this history than that. The book will be sold as being relevant to the modern GOP, but the story here is that of the creation of the modern DNC.
My thanks to the author, Issac Butler, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 