Art as a Personal Transformation

This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross Culture war never seems to end My guest Isaac Butler takes us through part of its history in his new book, The Perfect Ment, God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's culture Wars Butler says the conflict had a transformative effect on him, because at the same time the culture wars hurdled toward their climax, art saved his life His new book begins in nineteen seventy four in West Virginia, with the banning of many books and the county's new school curricula. with the power of the Christian right behind the ban There were also behind the attacks on Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ and the taboo breaking artwork of Robert Maplethorpe and David Voyonnerovich who were accused of creating pornography and Andreres Serano who was accused of creating blasphemous art The story continues with attacks on the NEA's federal funding for the Arts Isaac Butler is the author of the previous books, The Wor only spins forward about the play Angels in America and the method, about the history of the acting technique known as the method We recorded our interview last Thursday On Friday, the Texas Board of Education approved a new curriculum for students grade K through twelve, mandating each grade to have at least one Bible passage as required reading parents and teachers are alarmed. as the culture wars continue Butler, welcome back to fresh Air Thank you, Terry. It's great to be here So one of the main characters in your book is one of the leaders of the attacks on the artists who are in your book. And I'm thinking of Donald Wildman And he's one of the leading figures behind the first attack where your history begins. So let's start with Who was Donald Wildman Donalonna Wildman is a really fascinating, eccentric character who unfortunately died right as I was starting know doing my interviews for the book so I didn't get to talk to him, which is unfortunate. but Wildman was a pioneering, you know media advocacy activist. and he was an evangelical Christian Reverend in Tupolao, Missouri who kind of found his calling. That's how he describes it in his memoir trying to make American culture less blasphemous and less sinful In the seventies, this looked like leading boycott campaigns against these conglomerates because at that point, you know, like TV studios and movie studios were owned by these companies that also owned department stores and tin mines and literally coffin manufacturers and stuff like that. So he would do these consumer boycotts to get companies to either stop advertising on shows that he disliked or to pull shows or change the content of shows that he disliked. That was where he started. And he was very successful at it and built a really, really huge mailing l And in the eighties, he and a sort of coalition of other evangelical Christians take on Martin Scorsese's last temptation of Christ. and they pivot from that to taking on you know offtten quite unknown American so called high art. That's not really a division I believe in, but you know, American high art because it was funded by the government. And that created an opening for them to say, esssentially, you know you're wasting our taxpayer dollars on blasphemy and sin. Well, let's go back to nineteen seventy four. In Konawa County, West Virginia, where there was new school curricula from the school board And there was one person who held out on some of the books, on many of the books that were in this new curricula. Her name was Alice Moore. She was married to a church of Christ mininister And she also opposed sex education So she's one person on the board But how does Donald Wildman enter the act Alice Moore is a really also a really fascinating figure. You know, the Konawa County textbook War, which is what it sort of came to be called, was a thing I just discovered during research and it blew my mind because all of the factors in you know, what was gonna to become the culture war are present there. You have evangelical Christians, you know, using direct action and organizing and stuff like that to really change the direction of the government. In this case It was a legal mandate that curricula had to be diverse and reflect diverse perspectives on American life. and they were going to approve a new, you know, K through twelve curricula for the public schools to do that. And Alice Moore, who, as you said, had been elected to the school board on an explicitly anti sex ed platform, got them to delay that vote. And while they delayed that vote, a number of Christian organizations and churches both within the county and without came and lent their support. And so there's you know sort ofical the evangelical movement really comes into West Virginia. and they the situation spirals really far out of control over the course of the year. I mean, to a point where people are starting to try to bomb schools to keep schools U and the end result is they actually wind up kind of, you know vetoing this rule. They They manag to cause such a fuss that to get it to go away, this county and the school board eventually agree to not have these books come in and to change the rules about what books will be adopted. And within a few years, there's creationist textbooks in classrooms in Kinawa So it's this you know, that really created a kind of template that religious right figures like Donald Wildman would use again and again and again So if they created a template, what was the template Well, it starts with a really intense sense of grievance or performance of grievance, that other people expressing their rights essentially, other people's speech is oppressing you other people's point of view that you're you're, you know, Alice Moore says this flat out It's not that I don't want my child learning X, Y, and Z. I don't want my child to even know what they are You know, so it's this idea that's really key to the parents rights movement that You know, parents have absolute control over their children and to teach them things that they don't want is a form of discrimination against those parents. So you start with that kind of grievance and then you move there to you know organizing these direct action campaigns with petitions and letters and stuff like that E goal is to capture a kind ofon largely nonpisan group, like a school board or a regulatory committee or whatever it is and staff it with people who will then use it to perpetuate your ideological goals. So that's what they're always moving towards is capturing the decision makers or pressuring the decision makers and threatening the decision makers in such a way that they are going to help you pursue your ideological. So what were some of the books that were removed from the curricula as a result of this pressure campaign I mean, it's there's hundreds of them, right? And it' it's everything from, you know, essays by James Baldwin to there's a picture book of Jack and the beanstalk that someone objects to because there's, you know, a black kid and a white kid playing together on the cover So it really runs the gamut. It's hundreds of books that they pull. anthologies, especially of poetry and essays that are meant for, you know the equivalent of like AP or Baccalaureate juniors and seniors. you know, like upper level people doing adult level English literature work, that kind of stuff, offtten has a lot of adult themes, right? And so a lot of those books wind up getting pulled U some of which are, you know, books we might take for granted today, like the autobiography of Malcolm X. You know, that was one that got a lot of strikes against it Do you see similarities between this nineteen seventy four? case and what's happening now with the banning of books and donon't say gay. Yeah I absolutely do. The difference now of course is that they're in charge You know, you know, Ron DeSantis and the Republicans have a firm grip on the government in Florida. They have gotten those school boards staffed with, you know people who are ideologically in lockstep with them. So it's much easier. You just have to pass a bill, right? But it's absolutely the same stuff, which is that, you know, we don't want our children to learn that there are other ways of looking at the world That's what's really at the heart of it. And a lot of the other ways of looking at the world that they don't want their children to learn about, of course focus on sex, gender and sexuality So let's jump ahead to the late eighties and early nineties when transgressive art was very popular And it was very unpopular on the religious right and Donald Wildman again becomes a main character in this story. So let's start with Andre Serano who is best known for his photograph Christ And it was a part of a series that he called Immersions in which the images were based on body fluids either from animals or from people And it could range from blood to milk In this case, urine Um So I want you to describe the image and then we'll hear an excerpt of my interview with Andre Serano in which he talks about it The image, if you didn't know the title of the image, you would just think it was sort of this beautiful holy, you know to Christ and Christ's sacrifice. It is a crucifix angled a little bit towards the viewer, so the end of one of the arms is sort of disappearing into nothing. and it is in this murky kind of field, visual field. It's not even clear that it's a liquid when you first look at it. And it's backlit. so it has this kind of spectral kind of holy power to it And I think part of what caused all the controversy is the image is so beautiful and so Holy seeming. and then you know it's contrasted with this title that is extremely blunt and potentially, although that is not how he intended it, blasphemous And so it's those two things happening at once that I think help give the work of art its power There's something almost celestial about it because there's no ground, there's no sky. It's Christ like on the cross, kind of blurry who seems to be like floating in this ethereal space and It's very unearthly looking. It's almost as if like Christ is rising on the cross. and is kind of celestial looking. especially like if you don't know how it was made I find the photograph unbelievably moving, even knowing how it's made. And you know, like I'm a Jew. I still but I still think that that that that photograph is unbelievably moving and beautiful. And, you know, Serano was raised Catholic, considers himself, you know, a Christian, he met Pope Francis. you know, he is he is wrestling with his faith and he belongs to a long history of Catholic artists. I mean, Graam Greenens, the power and the Gory comes to mind to me. wrestling with their faith and the symbols of that faith So let's hear an ex chpt of the interview that I recorded with Andre Serano in nineteen ninety three. and it starts with him describing it It's a very mysterious image, I think, as many people have pointed out, without the title, it would have been seen as a very reverential treatment of the crucifix and you know, fit to hang in a church probably This was a photograph. Yes. But the Crucifix was actually immersed in urine. Yes. Yours. Yes Now when you put those two together, a lot of people see it as blasphemous Well, you know, I never saw it that way. And I remember when I first showed the work in New York that this woman, she was married to a reverend. She said to me, You know, when it comes to religion, my husband and I don't agree about anything, but we're both very moved by your picture And, you know, that essentially was the reaction at first. No one you know, paid much mind Except after, you know, the American Family Association got into the picture more than two years after the picture was first made What were you saying about religion in that piece I would say that u It's probably a reflection of my own ambivalent feelings about my Catholic upbringing. Aside from that, there's nothing specific here. you know, all sorts of claims have been made for that piece And I remember at the time that I was embroiled in the controversy, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art which was the sponsor of that very controversial grant and art show said to me, you know, the NA is rereathing down our X for an explanation and can we say it's a protest against the commercialization of religion and religious values And I said, you know, well, that's not language that I would use, but you know, if you want to say that, that's fine. What was it like for you to be at the center of a national controversy? too have your art addressed on the Senate floor It was very strange. I mean, at first, I couldn't believe it when they first told me that this was going on that thousands of people You know at the request of the American Family Association, we're sending in protest letters to Congress. And then I saw myself being denounced, you know on TV and in the congressional record That was the artist Andre Serano recorded in nineteen ninety three on Fresh Air. And my guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book The Perfect Moment, God Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars So it's so interesting because Serano was like, total unknown. Yeah until he was in this touring show because he was I think he'd won a kind of competition and all of the winners were in this group show that was touring So he mentions in the excerpt that we just heard the American Family Association That's Donald Wildman's group, who we've been talking about. So how did Wilderman pick up on this? I mean, it's a very weird set of circumstances. Someone saw the photograph in Richmond, Virginia at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. And they wrote a letter to the editor of the Richmond Times Dpatch about it And somehow Wildman learned about it through that letter, as far as I can tell. There's been accusations that he, you know, put that person up to it or whver, but I've never seen any evidence of that And so then he, you know started turning on the outrage machine about it. He was writing his list and they were, you know writing to Congress and all this stuff about this artwork, which at that point he hadn't seen. and I don't think anyone who was writing Congress about it had seen it because that show had been closed as Serano said for quite some time U and, you know, its it wasn't like the Sika touring art exhibit is not like a major art thing And then it got picked up by Jesse Helms, Senator Jesse Helms, who's from North Carolina, which is where SkA was based and was a major opponent of the arts and arts funding and was always on the lookout for stories like this to make hay out of U And then there's this weird thing where they have a copy of the catalogue of the exhibit and Al Damato, Senator of New York ask them to borrow the the catalogue and he brings it onto the Senate floor and he denounces Srano and he literally tears a page the out of the catalogue in the midst of his kind of rant about it. And after that kind of, you know, all hell kind of breaks loose for the NEA, especially. and to some extent for Serano who It becomes a little bit more reclusive out of it Although he has always said that that controversy helped put him on the map. And in fact, a few years after you did that interview with him He wrote Jesse Helmms a thank you note for making him famous. So yeah, he's a's he's a mischievous guy., you know, and so paintings were worth so much more. His gallery wanted to decline doing another show with him because in his previous gallery show, He'd only sold like one photograph But after the controversy, You know, he was selling a lot and he was, you know, it was it was a boon to his career It was a boon to his career. It reunited him with a daughter he had had previously that he wasn't, you know in contact with. I mean, it was a really life changing event for him. But not for the NEA But not for the Nang. No. I mean it's life changing, but Yeah yes It's a great way of putting it, Terry. L changing but bad. That should have been the title of the book. But the yeah, so what happens to the NA at this point is that there's a huge amount of scrutiny placed on it and it's grants. And the NA had had like a couple of minor controversies earlier. The biggest one was over Erica Jhong's novel Fear of Flying but the because of its frank discussion of sex, but you know, for the most part, it was kind of left alone. had you know, bipartisan support, peopleople didn't really care about it that much. But at that point, You know, American art is getting more purposely transgressive in response to the AIDS crisis and the religious right is getting more and more powerful. and the territory they fight that out over is the national Endowment for the arts and what it can and cannot fund So if we flash forward to today, How do you see the attacks on the NEA from the eighties and nineties going today and What state do you see the NEA being in today Well, I'll answer that second question first, which is just to say in the current proposed budget, the NEA is being sunsetted. The current proposed budget for twenty seven has the NA and the NH given sort of a token amount of money to allow them to unwind their operations over one to two years? So assuming that goes through, they're gone, know in terms of how I see this kind of playbook being used again and again and again, I just see it all over the place. You know, the selective Out of context misrepresentation of work to anger people happens all over the place, the politicizing of what are supposed to be aolitical decision makers within the government. I mean, I think that's sort of the story of the Trump administration. The Trump administration recently passed some rules that say, know something to the effect of to get any funding at all. You have to align yourself with one of the administration's priorities H And, you know, the other place I see it all over is this, you know, using the power of the purse. coercively A big example is all of those lawsuits against schools and law firms or the pulling of research funding from universities to get them to agree to perpetuate the ideology that you want them to perpetuate. That kind of power of the purse and discovering how coercive that can be and often can be both more coercive and maybe more constitutional than doing it through laws is a thing that the right really refines during the period of my story But let me reintroduce you, we have to take a break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler. He's the author of the new book, The Perfect Moment, God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culturure Wars We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air This is Fresh air. I'm Terry Gross Let's get back to my interview with director and cultural historian Isaac Butler, author of the new book The Perfect Moment, God, seex, Art and the birth of America's culture wars He previously was on the show for his book The Method, which is a history of the acting approach known as the metethod When we left off, we were talking about some of the artists at the center of the Culture Wars in the nineteen eighties and nineties because their work was considered pornographic or blasphemous. So Robert Maplethorpe, even if our listeners donon't know his work. His photographs, one photograph he took is especially famous because it's the album cover Patty Smith's first album Horses It's this iconic photo in which she's wearing a white and down men's shirt Um And an untied tie is dangling from her neck and she has like a suit jacket hanging from her thumb draped over her shoulder. It's a beautiful photo I don't think anyone's ever looked cooler than Patdty Smith looks in that photograph.s so true. You have to go to like Marlin Brando in the Wild one or something to get someone who just looked that She looks so cool. It's unbelievable. Yes, absolutely. But what he became really famous for was his graphic photographs of men having sex with each other with a focus sometimes on Satomasochism and the characters in his photos, We're often Yeah, which is something that he was sometimes criticized for for possibly like fetishizing. bllack bodies Yeah, I mean, I actually think it's unquestionable that he fetishized black bodies. I mean, you look at the things that he said privately and you just look at the photographs of black men eroticized black men. and I think the people who took offense at those photographs on those grounds were totally correct. You know, a lot of Robert Maplethorpe's work is portraits of celebrities, which are pretty amazing. He has an incredible one of Laurie Anderson and these almost kind of sinister and incredibly sexual seeming photos of flowers. But there is this you know, couple year period in the seventies where he is frequenting the Minehaft, which is a gay fetish bar and he's inviting people he meets there to come back to the studio and to photograph them doing the things that they are interested in doing sexually, which are things that People are really doing, I mean, it's documenting a thing that really exists in the world. But many people find those images quite upsetting. Now this is where the story interconnects with your family's story becausecause after the Corcoran gallery in Washington decides it's too controversial, they cancel their showing. They cancel their exhibit And a group called the Washington Project for the Arts decides We should pick it up. We should display this work And this is where your mother comes in Was she on the board of the WPI? My mother joined the board at some point that summer. She doesn't remember exactly when, but she did say to me, the very first board meeting I went to was when we voted on whether or not to take the perfect moment at the Washington Project for the Arts, because Jock Reynolds then the head of the WPA had, you know heard a little bit in advance that the show was about to get canceled at a dinner. And he was just like, we got to take that thing. You know, it's going to be good for us. It's good for free speech. it's good for the country. Let's do it And they didn't and it was a huge huge hip. So yeah, so my mother sort of came in a little late to the story and she was extremely helpful in getting me in contact with people who were involved in it at that time so that I could interview them Was your mother firm in her decision to vote for taking on this exhibit Yes, yeah, myother my mother absolutely was. I will say my mother is not interviewed in the book. She is actually one of the most charming extroverted you know, incredible people in the world, but she hates being interviewed and she doesn't like that kind of public attention. So she is not interviewed in the book. But yeah, no, it was not a question to her. you know Most of the kind of liberal DC arts, you know and intelligentia people were fully behind this show. They just were like, obviously this show needs to be seen. This is crazy. let's do it. Let's move on and talk about another artist who was condemned by the religious right for their work. and this is David Vornerovich who was also targeted by Donald Wildman, the head of the American Family Association And he was accused of pornography and he insisted that his sexual images were partart of a larger political istic context because some of this work was in collages So before we talk about him, I want you to say a few words about his work and then we'll hear him describing it Voyner Rovich is a really hard figure to summarize because he's such a polymath. He's a writer, he's an activist with A Up. You know he's a visual artist, he does collages, installations, paintings. He really does it all And his work is very raw. It is often you know fueled by a really intense rage. and much of it is in response to the reality of living as a gay man and a person with AIDS in America at a time when both of those groups are really outcasts in society So let's hear an excerpt of the interview I recorded with him in nineteen ninety. and this was two years before he died of AIDS at the age of thirty seven And u, This This was recorded the week. He took Donald Wildman. to court and sued him for misrepresenting him and taking him out of context And he was awaiting a verdict on this at the time that we spoke So this excerpt starts with Vornerovich talking about How Donald Wildman used his art took Verner Roverge's art out of context what he did was he excised from the images, small fragments that dealt with sexual activity and depicted sexual activity that were in a political and artistic context stripped the context from around the image and then presented that image as the full work. put my name on it, and he did this to fourteen images, three of which were not sexual in nature and sent them around the country What charges were made about your art in the literature that was sent out with images from your work in it? Well it was sent out in an envelope that was marked a warning extremely offensive materials enclosed or something. I don't have the envelope in front of me, so that's an approximate description of it. left the very strong impression that my work consists of solely nothing more than a banal pornography. Now, you're saying that he took one component of a larger mixed media collage work and blew that up and presented that as being representative of your work. You've been working with mixed media images. R For a long time. Tell us a little bit about why you work in That form. I guess emotionally and intellectually, it's the only way that I can represent what my experience in the world is given that when we walk out in the street, we're so heavily bombarded with visual information, whether it's store signs, newspaper covers, magazine covers, advertising, et cetera, that I like to use a variety of media that somehow approximates what it's like to walk down a street or to move through space in contemporary America. One of the issues that brought your work into the center of national controversy was the nineteen eighty nine group show called Witnesses Against Our Vanishing aboutbout the influence of AIDS on aesthetics, sexuality and culture. This was a group show at a gallery called Artist Space in New York What was your reaction when after the NEA reinstated money for the show, it still refused to fund the catalogue because of your essay Oh I I I found it very distressing because one it set a precedent terms of funding that now single objects can be separated from a show because somebody doesn't like their political content two it sent a message to institutions around the country, publicly funded institutions that they shouldn't deal with work that might be critical in terms of politics. That was the artist, David Voyorovich, recorded in nineteen ninety. And my guest is Isaac Butler, author of a new book called The Perfect Moment, which is a History of the Culture Wars So can you describe the lawsuit Voynnerovich was talking about. Yes. So Voyerovich is suing Wildman over this tactic that the right is really good at goingo back to Kinawa and forward to today, which is taking excerpts of something out of context and saying that it is representative of the larger whole in order to get people angry, right? And so what Wildman did was he took these collages that have little images that are you know they're refhotographed and kind of distorted and whatever, many of which are from pornography magazines that are part of these lar collages and he's saying this is this is the work And so Wildman sues him, hisis lawyer is actually David Cole, who's now one of the foremost you know F Amendment ACLU attorneys in the country, but David Cole is his attorney. And they sue Wildman over a couple of fronts. copyright infringement libel and violating this new law in New York protects artists against their work being misrepresented and used without their permission. And it's a very funny weird trial. It lasts one day because everyone has already been deposed and they all agree to enter those depositions into evidence. So it's just sort of like David Voyonerovich gets on the stand, Donalonna Waman gets on the stand, it's over. you know, And what the judge eventually rules is that it doesn't meet the standard of libel, but it did violate this New York state law instituted to protect artists. And so Voyonerovich wins the lawsuit and he is awarded an p apology that the American Family Association has to send out to its mailing list and one dollar in damages, which is the symbolic amount you give when you believe a harm has been done, but that it didn't actually cause any financial harm This is another instance where the artist wins, in this case actually wins in court. Yeah But the NEA suffers because Donald Weildman's goal was to just like, Get rid of the NEA Yes, yes, that is true. I mean and it didn't get rid of the NEA, but with each of these attacks, I think the NEA becomes weaker. Yes, with each of these attacks, the NA becomes weaker, the NEA loses allies in Congress It's death by a thousand cuts, right? With each of these things that happens, you know, the NEA is either is forced to spend political capital or the attacks on it are increasing just over and over and over again U that said you know, the kind of immediate quick compromises that the NA and its allies are doing before this moment are also weakening You know, So there's a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect to it which is really difficult because there's so few people in Congress who are willing to just be like You know The government doesn't pick ideological winners and losers in choosing what to fund, and that includes the arts And so sometimes the government is going to fund art that makes people angry, and that is okay because making people angry is actually a legitimate function of the arts My guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book The Perfect Moment, God seex Art birth of America's culture wars We'll be right back. This is fresh air This is fresh air Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of The Perfect Moment God, sex, art and the birth of America's culture wars It focuses on the religious rights attacks on certain books, art, and film of the seventies, eighties, and nineties. You write in your book that At the same time, the cultural wars were reaching their peak. in the nineties. you were transformed by the culture wars and by art U What do you mean by that? Well, you know, when I was a kid, I was like a lot of theater kids, I was kind of a lonely bullied unhappy child. And I got but I loved acting and I loved theater and I wound up passast in professional musical called Falsettaand by William Finn and James Lapopine, which is a musical about what the meaning is of the American family and the AIDS crisis in its early stages, the musical takes place in the early eighties And u you know, and and and and what it is to be gay in America. So I played the son of a man who has left his wife for another man. And you know, this family is trying to muddle through that while The father's lover is dying of a mysterious new illness, which is, of course, AIDS And so u That was a real eye opener for all sorts of reasons, which is, among other things, you, gay liberation and the AIDS crisis became very real to me as opposed to things that I heard about because my parents had the McNeil Lair NewsHour on in the evening. And I was meeting gay adults. I was meeting people who had AIDS, gay people, and people with AIDS were coming to see the show talking to me afterwards and I just like at this moment when art really saved me because I was in a really bad place emotionally, personally psychologically and, you know being in that show really changed my life for the better. It's one of the most formative experiences of my life And at that point the fight for American arts and free expression, those protests were really fueled by the gay rights movement and act up. So all of these contexts were overlapping at the same time How do you think the AIDS epidemic in some ways really changed American art or aspects of American art U People who were gay and especially gay people who had AIDS were considered Um Dangerous. oututsiders Um Threats to our health and culture And marriage and thats to our marriage. I mean, it was that era So it's I think understandable why they made transgressive art because they were their way of living was considered just being gay was considered transgressive. Yeah, I mean, when you have a congress. I don't want to completely put that in the past tense because that's kind of resurfaced That That's absolutely. It's too transgressive, you can't live that way. especially Let's withdraw legalizing gay marriage Yeah, well, and we see it even more right now with the transgender community who are losing rights that they used to have, who are being shunned from the public square, who are you faced with legal discrimination. They're finding that there's whole states within the United States that they can't really travel to because there's so many laws discriminating against them And once again, we see a lot of the liberal establishment willing to compromise on a lot of that stuff in the hopes that it will go away. It's the exact same dynamic really that we saw in the original culture Wars. Um Yeah, when you are faced with a congressman like William Danameer, who's saying that HIV positive people emit spores that cause birth defects, which is a literal thing he said at one point. You know, How do you respond to that? If you're responding to that in your art, you know, it's probably not going to be very polite I don't want to leave the left completely off the hook comes to objecting to art the left is not extxtreme about this in the way that the right has been One of the shows that you've written about is a show by Philip Gustin who was a late visual artist And he had a show There were images depicting clan, members of the clan But in kind of clownish ways, it was pretty obviously satirical work. and there were people on the left in the art world who objected to this exhibit. Can you explain? Yeah, so this is a posthumous retrospective of Philip Gustin that was originating in the UK and then touring to the United States. And actually this exhibit and The fallout of it was the initial impetus behind my deciding it was time to write this book and try to research the culture wars. Um In twenty twenty, the exhibit was kind of indefinitely delayed. It really seemed like it had been canceled, although it did eventually tour, just to be clear. Because of these late period paintings that Gustin had done that had kind of cartoony images of the Kan in them, there was the feeling that They needed to be, you know greater. I'm going to put this in big scare quotes. Cext around the art you know, or that the art was not sufficiently condemning white supremacy or even if it did, the mirror image could traumatize someone. The mere image of a cllansman could traumatize someone And I just thought and continue to think that that's absolutely absurd U Philip Gustin was a Jewish artist. He had run ins with the Klan early in his career. He was a lifelong anti racist. Like you really don't need anything more than putting that on a wall card. the cllan hated Jews too. I mean, it wasn't just bllack people, it was Jewish people. It was Catholics too Yes, absolutely. And you know one of his early murals that he did during the New Deal, if I recall correctly, was actually destroyed by a crowd that included Klansmen. So you know, he himself had been threatened And I just felt like What are we even doing here, people? Why are my allies on the left and in the arts pulling this kind of stuff, especially since this is all theoretical, there haven't even been any complaints. And so eventually the show did tour and did open in the United States. L the Maplethorpe XYZ portfolios, the Gustin paintings were sequestered in a separate room that you had to go into, surrounded by mental health literature. I mean, it's just ridiculous. And so that was where the book actually began because I really wanted claim free expression and free speech as a left wing value as an important part of living in a diverse liberal democracy And then of course, as soon as I started working on it all the run, D Santis and donon't say gay stuff happened, and I started to feel like, well, also, it's just totally asymmetric What what do you mean Well, what I mean is like, you know, yes, the left does stuff around expression that is annoying and sometimes has material consequences and I don't like it and I condemn it and I have for a long time But it really pales in comparison to what the right does on these issues, both because the right has a lot more power currently in the United States, but it's also the way they choose to wield that power when they have it If you're just join us, my guest is Isaac Butler, He's the author of the new book The Perfect Moment, God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars We'll be right back after a short break. This is fresh air This is fresh air Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of The Perfect Moment God, sex, art and the birth of America's culture wars. It focuses on the religious rights attacks on certain books, art, and film of the seventies, eighties, and nineties A lot of art has become very political now because we're living in such a divisive time And there are artists who feel like Art isn'tre relevant unless you're really speaking to the moment and to the crises that we're in U and you object to that and know to the sense that like art needs to like speak to the moment and be political Tell us about your objections to that way of thinking My objection is mainly to the viewing of it as a requirement. know I think it's great when art speaks to the moment. But the idea that that's the only art that's worth doing, I find very depressing and narrow, because art is such a wonderful, capacious part of the human experience You know, peopleople wrote love poems in the gulag. You know what I mean? It's like know we come to the arts as the kind of dream life of the self. And sometimes those dreams are very political.ike sometimes I have very political dreams and sometimes I have dreams where I'm like flying and then I plunge into a bowl of soup or whatever, you know? So I just think that we shouldn't limit the possibilities of art to anyone specific. thing And I also feel like You know, and I'm sure you've had this experience looking at art of whatever kind where an artist feels that it's necessary they speak to the moment, but that's not really what they're good at or that's not really what's in their soul. And so there's something hollow simple and didactic about the art that results. and I would just want art that is more complex and interesting. So if we were to extend your book to the present What would you be writing about President Trump and the culture wars. Well, the book would, you know, become infinite because it seems like they pick a culture war about everything. Like, do I really have to do a chapter about whether it's okay that Helen of Troy is black in the new Christopher Nolan movie? You know, like it just seems like even breakfast cereals or whatever have become part of the culture wars now. Like the culture wars have completely eaten America I will say that when Trump got elected, it was a real fork in the road for me and the book because I had decided when the book started that I was going to keep it in its own time and not comment on the present very much, you know, just in the intro and afterward, basically And when Trump was elected, I really did have this moment where I was like, oh God, do I need to pivot Comment on today And I eventually decided no. And the reason why I decided no is that I wanted the work to have integrity as a work of history. And once you make it all about the present, it becomes a polemic and that's just a different kind of beast and I didn't want to do it. And the other reason is like the book would be like six thousand pages long And it wouldn't be finished by the time it was published. ight. N notot only would it be finished by the time was published, it would be immediately obsolete Books are a bad art form for commenting on things that are happening right now because they take so long to make. I mean, they physically take so long to make that they're sort of outdated the second they come out Well, Isaac Butler, it's been great to have you back on the show. Thank you so much Terry, thank you so much for having Isaac Butler is the author of the new book, The Perfect Moment, God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars Tomorrow on fresh air, a relatively new breed of ticks spreading across regions of America. They're ready to feed on us and bringing dangerous illness and allergies that could be lethal. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR FreshAir Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Briger Our technical director and engineer is Orgie Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanisheevsky. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, and Marie Bolddonado, Lauren Krrenzel, Theeresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Theaya Challiner, Susan Nakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler Our digital media producer is Molly Sivine Eesper Roberta Sharak directs the show. Our co host is Tona Moseley I'm Terry Gross.