When America’s Culture Wars Were Fought in Art Galleries

Conservatives were once obsessed with “Piss Christ.” The Andres Serrano photograph, actually titled Immersion, debuted in 1987, but I can attest that it soaked through the pores of the right-wing mind well into the Bill Clinton years. I was growing up in a small Chicago suburb, attending Lutheran grade school, and the phrase denoting some coupling of liquid waste and the Christian savior was in constant rotation in conversation. Teachers, relatives, and parents of friends would evoke the “blasphemy” of Serrano, without uttering the artist’s name, as proof that society was going to hell, literally. That an image of a crucifix in human urine had, indirectly, received funding from the federal government was proof that liberals, artists, feminists, gays—essentially anyone who did not conform to the Christian, two-parent family unit lifestyle—constituted extreme danger to all that was holy.  

As soon as the internet became publicly accessible—painfully slow dial-up connections and all—there was a Streisand effect in play. One of the first images that my friends and I found online was Immersion. We had imagined something horrific, a picture so evil that merely casting eyes upon it would cast our souls into the devil’s lair. Instead, we found a photograph with a mysterious, eerie, and disorienting beauty. A white crucifix is bathed in a red and yellowish light. We were too young to speak as critics, but our silence as we stared at the screen stemmed from the realization that we were looking at genuine art. It provoked thought through discomfort, reinvented the familiar, and subverted expectations. None of these effects would have occurred to us junior high boys. So, we grew bored, never to think of “Piss Christ” again, save for wondering whenever a pious parent or principal would bring it up, “What’s the big deal?” 

The Perfect Moment: God, Sex,
Art, and the Birth of America’s
Culture Wars by Isaac Butler.
Bloomsbury, 384 pp.

But as art critic, author, and podcast host Isaac Butler makes clear in his new book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, “Piss Christ” and transgressive visual and performance art really were a big deal throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. With his deft and thoughtful study, he 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 story begins not with a hero, but a villain: the multi-decade U.S. senator from North Carolina, Republican Jesse Helms. Butler is wise to argue that Helms was an ideological and tactical founder of the contemporary Republican Party. Long before Donald Trump crawled out of his palatial sewer and Fox News beamed into the brains of middle America, Helms recognized the political power of hatred: hatred of Blacks, hatred of immigrants, hatred of women who did not adhere to a conservative, religious lifestyle, and hatred of gays.  

A savvy partisan operator, Helms believed that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) gave him and fellow reactionaries the means to keep the old hatreds burning, while forcing liberals into a defensive crouch. Beginning with Serrano’s Immersion photographs, Helms argued that the NEA undermined “American values,” blasphemed God, and celebrated the perverse priorities of the liberal elite. Many Republican officials and media commentators would eventually join his campaign against the NEA, demanding its budgetary demolition whenever they could find a controversial exhibit that benefited—even indirectly—from NEA dollars, say, through a grant to the host museum in the same fiscal year. Typically, the work would involve a gay or Black artist or subject, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexually provocative photography or subsequent depictions of life with AIDS from LGBTQ visual and performance artists.  

With each example, a pattern emerges—a pattern so predictable that each of Butler’s chapters began to resemble highly formulaic television programs. The plot is essentially the same, only the details differ. In the 1980s and ‘90s, it went something like this: 1) A gallery receiving NEA funds advertises an exhibit involving same-sex activity or provocative use of religious imagery, 2) Helms and other Republicans claim that civilization has collapsed, and that the Democratic Party, with its secular, feminist, and gay-rights supporting values is to blame, 3) A few courageous and honest Democratic politicians defend the NEA and the merits of art, even if it makes some people uncomfortable, in a pluralistic, democratic society, 4) The supposedly progressive and fearless gallery or museum surrenders to Republican pressure by reducing, limiting, or outright cancelling the exhibit. For examples of the latter, the gallery that hosted “Piss Christ” cut the exhibit short, and other nonprofits revoked grants to Serrano. The gallery in Washington, D.C., that was scheduled to host the controversial Mapplethorpe exhibit canceled it altogether.  

In the conclusion of The Perfect Moment, Butler writes, “Reader, if you have reached this point in the book, I am grateful to you as I am wary of exasperating you with repetition.” A good sign that a book is repetitive is an author expressing worry of “exasperating” the reader. Beyond the repetition, Butler suffers from a myopic focus on his thesis, mainly that, as the subtitle would suggest, the culture wars began with Helms’s war on the NEA.  

But this elides much of the 20th Century. Certainly, the Hollywood blacklist was an early iteration of the culture war, as was the Lavender Scare. President Richard Nixon’s denigration of young liberal activists and his invocation of the “silent majority” was an effective deployment of culturally coded language. Butler demonstrates a similarly narrow analysis when, in the opening pages, he declares that the George W. Bush years were not significant in the culture wars. Perhaps he missed when Clear Channel, the radio conglomerate, instructed its stations to refrain from playing music with anti-Iraq War sentiment, such as Black Sabbath’s War Pigs and Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World. He ignores the GOP efforts to place sanctity-of-marriage ballot initiatives in swing states in 2004 to goose conservative turnout. Butler might also have forgotten how the religious right warned of the apocalypse and boycotted movie theaters over Brokeback Mountain. 

In his correct and necessary excoriation of the priggish and repressive right, Butler commits the error of ignoring the left’s instinct to censor. For example, in an early passage, he writes that there is currently an effort to suppress “pro-Palestinian” voices. The assertion reads like a report from another planet. The 2025 National Book Award winner, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is a nonfiction outpouring of bile against Israel. In the same year, the documentary, No Other Land, a critical look at Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank, won Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards, and even more recently, M. Gessen won a Pulitzer Prize for opinion writing that routinely offers harsh criticism of Israel. Meanwhile, bookstores in Chicago and New York have canceled events featuring authors supportive of Israel; the publishing trade magazine Shelf Awareness rejected a paid advertisement for Bernard-Henri Levy’s book, Israel Alone; and music venues in Chicago, Santa Fe, and Tucson canceled nearly sold-out shows by the Jewish musician, Matisyahu.  

Despite Butler’s narrow vantage point and, by his own admission, his repetitiveness, The Perfect Moment offers crucial insights into contemporary crises in American politics and much longer-standing cultural failures.  

First, it is essential to understand, as Butler persuasively argues, that the “culture wars” almost always disguise wider bigotry. It is hardly a coincidence that every battle over visual art that Butler dissects, like every contemporary fight over a library book, involves the work of Black, Latino, gay, or transgender people. Implicit in nearly every cultural battle over photography, novels, or movies is the idea that “they” should not amplify anything about their views or their lives; “they” should sit silently in a corner and have no place in a public library. The cultural agenda coheres with the political program of the MAGA Republican Party, currently on display with the political disfranchisement of Black political power, the violent persecution of Latino immigrants, the opposition to women controlling their bodies, and the promotion of state laws targeting transgender citizens. 

The power of the late Senator Helms, whose ideology became dominant on the American right, demonstrates that the Republican Party has, in modern times, been a reactionary force. Still, Butler captures how the party was at war with itself in previous eras. When Helms began demanding the NEA’s demolition, then-President George H.W. Bush appointed a moderate Democrat, John Frohnmayer, as director of the beleaguered agency. Operating according to a sophisticated, now-defunct country-club conservatism, along with a well-reported discomfort with the religious right, Bush hoped that Frohnmayer could navigate tempestuous waters by preserving federal support for the arts while tempering the rage of evangelicals. There is a hilarious quote in The Perfect Moment when Bush tells Frohnmayer that he is “doing a good job,” but that he and his wife, Barbara, are uncomfortable with the “urine and rectum stuff.” Despite misgivings about the more provocative material by Serrano and Mapplethorpe, Bush maintained a healthy air of indifference. Butler quotes Bill Kristol, who was Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff, as summarizing the 41st president’s position: “People being angered by performance art paled in importance when compared to the seismic shifts happening in Eastern Europe.” 

George H.W. Bush’s priorities reveal a confident and sane president concerned with the substance of governance, unlike the current administration, with a cabinet full of clownish vulgarians who behave as if the executive branch is the Fox News green room. Of course, their boss, with his Truth Social logorrhea, is the shock jock-in-chief. 

Bush, Frohnmayer, and liberals all made the same error by believing that the NEA’s adversaries were, first and foremost, sincere about championing quality in the artistic world. It isn’t hard to imagine that Helms was genuinely outraged by “Piss Christ.” Still, conviction was a distant second to the political utility of attacking racial and sexual minorities and the Democratic Party that attempted to give them some governmental representation.  

It is maddening to read multiple examples of art galleries and museums caving to right-wing pressure, expecting some political rhythm. It becomes especially absurd when, as Butler makes clear, polls showed—to my surprise—that even at the height of the NEA wars, nearly two-thirds of Americans supported the agency. The censors also lost every time a case went to court. But even with public opinion and the law on their side, the liberals of the art world refused to strike a counterblow in the name of free expression. As Butler writes, “If your opponents will find a way to launch bad-faith attacks against you no matter what, then all that is left to do is organize and fight.”  

It is a lesson that Democrats should heed as they often try to placate a political party dedicated to its destruction. With the expectation that Republicans will view them as reasonable and slow the attack machine, recent years have produced many examples of Democrats bashful about publicly arguing for transgender rights, framing their immigration position around “border security,” and parroting the right-wing use of “woke” as a pejorative. As the midterms and the 2028 presidential election will undoubtedly show, the same people who claimed that Barack Obama, a moderate Democrat, was to the left of Vladimir Lenin are not going to suddenly operate in good faith just because Democrats make a few rhetorical concessions.  

Despite his important insights, Butler also misses a crucial and challenging part of the story. The cultural script has flipped. Transgression is now the signal quality of reactionaries, allowing MAGA-coded figures to appeal to young men and others who view liberals as overly sensitive and too uptight. Only a fool would compare, on their own merits, Robert Mapplethorpe, an accomplished and technically brilliant visionary, with manosphere “comedians,” a collection of childish buffoons who speak as if they haven’t read a book since Dr. Seuss. But disruption is now the province of the right. 

Despite the obvious differences in artistic merit, intelligence, and any other quality of distinction, the MAGA comedians, including Trump himself, have a similar effect on liberals as Mapplethorpe and Serrano had on evangelicals. This is largely due to evangelical ignorance and piety, as Serrano and Mapplethorpe were creating thoughtful works of art. In the case of the latter, Serrano has even spoken about his Christian beliefs and how “Piss Christ” was an attempt to illuminate the messy humanity of the Biblical doctrine that Jesus was God made into man. Trump-worshipping comics do not make anything of artistic value, but instead disguise hate speech as humor, often poorly. For example, it is difficult to identify anything resembling a joke in Tony Hinchcliffe’s infamous statement that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage.” He said it at a Trump rally with both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in attendance, demonstrating how far mainstream culture, particularly Republican Party politics, has fallen from elementary standards of decency.  

To even use a phrase like “standards of decency” is now to join the supposed schoolmarms. The Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, has reacted to this strange development by advising liberal Democrats to become the “party of family values.” While it is true that Democrats have become the “values voters”—opposition to racism and misogyny are worthier values than whatever Helms was trying to advance—it is dangerous to toss around phrases like “family values” in a society where politically funded groups organize book bans against LGBTQ+ authors, with the accusation that literature is “pornography.”  

Given how much the American mainstream has changed, The Perfect Moment often reads as a dispatch from a time warp. The America that became enraged over provocative images in art galleries is long gone.  

Butler briefly describes an exchange between Helms and Robert Novak, the late conservative columnist, when Novak was the guest host of CNN’s Larry King Live. A caller to the program said, “I’ve been an active member of the Republican Party for thirty-five years, and I just want to say that you guys are just wonderful Americans … And Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct to say these days, but I think that you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you’ve done to help keep down the n*****s.”  

Helms grinned and said, “Whoops.” Novak laughed.  

Rather than pictures of nude men or crucifixes, this is but one example of the obscenity that should have frightened America.  

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