The Perfect Moment

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.

Booklist

In this lively history, Butler revisits the American culture wars that started in the late nineteen-eighties. . . Along the way, indelible scenes . . . lend the political history novelistic propulsion. The culture wars, Butler suggests, are less a closed chapter than a continuing conflict.

The New Yorker

Tightly focused and purposive . . . the book is replete with striking details all the way through . . . [The Perfect Moment] brings together stories of art-worldpeople whose undertakings might be otherwise forgotten.

Paul Elie, Los Angeles Review of Books

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.

Boston Globe

The Perfect Moment maps the history of the NEA, the largest arts funder in the US, and archconservatives like Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan, who used provocative pieces of art to stir the right’s base into a moral panic. Structured like both a two-act play and nonviolent military history, Butler builds a case for how the battle over American contemporary art laid the groundwork for our present moment. This history feels particularly urgent now.

Mother Jones

Butler makes the case for how and why culture became a central political background and what was at stake. Reading it today—against the backdrop of the Second Culture War—evokes an uncanny déjà vu . . . His history unfold[s] with the pace of a courtroom drama . . . [The Perfect Moment] may also provide a model for how to approach the current moment: by paying close critical attention.

The Baffler

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.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn

[A] fascinating, well-researched, well-reported cultural history, written with a sense of drive and suspense.

Chris Klimek, NPR's "Pop Culture Happy Hour"

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.

Washington Monthly

A new history of the conservative outrage machine . . . In the last quarter of the twentieth century, art became lashed to financial, religious, and political power in unprecedented ways . . . Butler smartly widens his lens to see this period as part of a larger throughline of right-wing Evangelical activism that started with comparatively small-bore protests.

Commonweal

Gripping and exhaustively researched.

Meredith Blake, The Contrarian

As Isaac Butler enthusiastically recounts in The Perfect Moment, the debate over collective morals, values and aesthetics has its roots in the culture wars that exploded during the 1980s . . . Butler’s comprehensive book details the congressional efforts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, led by the bombastic North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms amid the early years of the AIDS crisis . . . Butler leads readers on a meticulous tour through each successive controversy.

The San Francisco Chronicle

In an entertaining blend of courtroom drama and art history . . . [The Perfect Moment] explores nothing less than the struggle for cultural hegemony in the United States—specifically between a Christian nationalist and a left-liberal camp . . . Butler demonstrates just how diffuse and sometimes paradoxical the ideological boundaries in this struggle can be.

Die Presse

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.

Tricia Romano, author of THE FREAKS CAME OUT TO WRITE

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.

Nayland Blake, artist and author of MY STUDIO IS A DUNGEON IS THE STUDIO

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.

June Thomas, author of A PLACE OF OUR OWN

[A]n incisive commentary on the dangers of censorship in a nation that proclaims freedom of speech as a fundamental constitutional right . . . The Perfect Moment underscores an urgent reality — that artists must find a way to sustain themselves through their work.

The Arts Fuse

[A] timely reassessment of the culture wars is brought to you by someone raised on its front lines. . . [Butler] was inspired to write this book while watching the tides turn again in the 2020s: Where the left had once been the bastion of free expression, soon it was the right championing—and rebranding—'free speech' . . . Here history emerges a playbook for the new wave of culture wars ahead.

Art in America

Isaac Butler has written a history of the controversies – dubbed the 'culture wars' – that arose in the United States around the arts and arts-adjacent fields from the mid-1980s to around 2000 . . . Butler tells a vivid story with good portraits of the artists whose work was at issue. He is especially good at defining the bind that National Endowment for the Arts chairs John Frohnmayer, and then Jane Alexander, found themselves in as they endeavored both to keep the NEA alive in the face of Congressional threats to kill it.

Arts Journal