Reading Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment

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. These were fights over state censorship of art, and the separate issue of restrictions on the content of art that could be available for government funding, even if quite indirectly.
Butler tells a vivid story with good portraits of the artists whose work was at issue. He is