“People ask me if I think Helms was really offended by this stuff, and I think Helms was having the time of his fucking life.” — Isaac Butler
A few days ago, Katy Siegel and Elise Armani came on the show to assess the state of American culture in 1976. What was America? we asked. Today’s guest picks up the story immediately afterwards, when the health of this culture sharply declines. Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment is a history of the eighties and nineties, when America’s culture wars became political cudgels of the right. It’s the story of an increasingly imperfect America in the age of Jesse Helms and Robert Mapplethorpe.
The title is Mapplethorpe’s. It was the name of his retrospective that the Corcoran Gallery cancelled in 1989. The same show that later resulted in a Cincinnati museum director being indicted for obscenity — a first in American history.
Butler reminds us of the strangely consensual world that existed before the culture wars. It was an America in which the CIA covertly funded the artists that the FBI was investigating. An America where Louis Armstrong was sent abroad as a cultural ambassador while the agency plotted in the countries he was touring. An America in which a congressman was convinced that drip paintings were encrypted maps of American military assets. A liberal America where the culture and the state maintained a polite, albeit tangled, relationship.
And then, with the birth of the culture wars, God, sex and art all acquired instant political charge. Butler’s argument is about power, not taste. He reminds us that a giggly Jesse Helms kept the Mapplethorpe catalogue in his office and showed his favorite (ie: most vulgar) pages to visitors. Butler suggests that Helms was having the time of his life. Perhaps. Although this culture war wasn’t a lot of fun for the rest of us. Certainly not for the under-fire artists. Nor for an art-loving public caught in its hysterical crossfire. That, I’m afraid, is what America has become.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Isaac Butler is a writer, director and cultural historian based in Brooklyn. He is the author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and the co-author, with Dan Kois, of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. He co-created the stage work Real Enemies, on conspiracy theory and American paranoia, and writes on film, theatre and politics.
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
02:44 — The last of the postwar consensus
06:43 — The other arts funder: the CIA, secretly
07:52 — The FBI investigating the artists the CIA was paying
13:07 — What Helms, Buchanan and Robertson were doing before
15:41 — The religious right was born fighting for airtime
18:00 — Reagan courted them, then gave them nothing
19:31 — Goldwater, Catholics, and why abortion became the issue
22:09 — What transgressive actually means
23:20 — The AIDS crisis hits American art
26:02 — Why the book is called The Perfect Moment
29:32 — Mapplethorpe, the Corcoran and Cincinnati
33:19 — The catalogue in Jesse Helms’s office
36:37 — Should the government fund offensive art?
38:38 — From the first culture wars to the Kennedy Center
49:41 — Why pre-emptive compromise fails
54:13 — What artists can do now
57:42 — Closing