Isaac Butler's The Perfect Moment excavates the late 20th century to show that the political playbook of the 2020s was perfected in earlier battles over paintings, photographs, and performance art. The title originates from a retrospective exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's career that famously included homoerotic images and was canceled under political pressure, setting off a chain reaction of controversy that eventually engulfed the National Endowment for the Arts in issues of censorship that would land before the Supreme Court.
On the conservative side are names that still resonate: Jesse Helms, the North Carolina senator who denounced Andres Serrano's Immersion (Piss Christ); Pat Buchanan, who saw an opportunity to reshape Republican politics; and Pat Robertson, whose evangelical coalition provided the foot soldiers. They manufactured moral panic and turned it into coordinated political assault. On the other side stand artists like Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS complications months before conservative activists and politicians seized upon his touring exhibit to stir public outrage and push for restrictions on federal arts funding. Performance artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck (they became known as the N.E.A. Four) found themselves defunded and demonized for work that engaged directly with queerness, feminism, and the AIDS crisis. The N.E.A. chair who hoped that sacrifice would appease critics vetoed their grants.
The tactics deployed by the right--deliberate conflation of artistic provocation with criminal obscenity, strategic outrage, targeting of public funding, weaponized mobilization of religious identity--are tactics still deployed against educators, librarians, drag performers, and historians. Butler (The Method) doesn't need to belabor the contemporary parallels; this exhaustively investigated and deeply persuasive argument makes them crystal clear.--Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.