The Urgent Lessons of the ’90s Culture Wars

It is not a happy time to be an arts advocate in the United States. The last year has seen the real threat of eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, and the spectacle of the head of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History hauled in front of Congress to be publicly grilled about her programming by Republicans.

For many observers, all this is very alarming, but also gives the sinking feeling of having seen this story play out before. You often hear that we are living through a return of the “culture wars,” the turbulent period of very public, very bruising battles over decency and public funding for the arts from the late 1980s and early 1990s. In many ways, what happened back then set the template for the politics of today.

This is the story told in the recently published book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars. In it, author Isaac Butler revisits the various battles over the National Endowment for the Arts from of the ‘80s and ‘90s. He joins Ben Davis today to go through this history, and to ask what it can tell us about the present.

Images:

Projection of a Robert Mapplethorpe self-portrait during a protest at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Photographed June 30, 1989 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Carol Guzy/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Christians protest outside the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, at the portrayal of Christ in Martin Scorsese's film 'The Last Temptation of Christ', New York City, 13th August 1988. One of the placards reads: 'God Damns Blasphemy'. (Photo by Barbara Alper/Getty Images)

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, (1987). Courtesy Andres Serrano.