James Panero is executive editor at the New Criterion.
With the release of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster “The Odyssey” last week, everyone suddenly has an opinion on how to interpret Homer’s ancient poem. Who gets to play Helen? What’s with the casting of this or that Achaean? Why should viewers accept Agamemnon’s “Dark Knight” armor when Homer says he donned a flashier Bronze Age style?
Before the movie opened, online critics were calling for a boycott of what they saw as a woke Trojan horse. Some hot takes have now cooled as they confronted an epic work of filmmaking. Still, I could not be more pleased to see such passions over a 2,700-year-old tale.
The culture wars are back, and I am glad for their return. When the dust settles, the art left standing is the better for it.
“The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars,” a new book by Isaac Butler, focuses on the Reagan- and Bush-era battles over transgressive museum exhibitions and performance art. Butler borrows the title from the touring 1988-90 retrospective of work by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which featured sadomasochistic imagery. The show was canceled in D.C. and led to criminal charges against a museum and its director in Cincinnati.
Butler argues that if the United States is now engaged in Culture War II, the 1980s and ’90s saw Culture War I. He writes, “The culture wars are seemingly without end, and inescapable. This was true long before Trump entered our political world, and it will be true well after he is gone.” Controversy over today’s “Odyssey,” for example, echoes the 1988 boycotts of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Martin Scorsese’s retelling of the New Testament.
Butler is a theater historian and self-described “opinionated guide to this history.” Starting with 1974’s Kanawha County Textbook War — when West Virginians took up arms against new grammar books proposed for schools — “The Perfect Moment” takes readers through Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” the 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, and the NEA Four, performance artists whose National Endowment for the Arts grants were revoked for indecency in 1990, sparking a legal battle that reached the Supreme Court. Butler wraps up with the Brooklyn Museum’s “Sensation” show of 1999, which included a Virgin Mary made with elephant dung. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) responded with an attempt to evict the museum.
These battles were ugly the first time around. Not everyone may care to revisit them. Must I recall Annie Sprinkle’s supposedly “government funded” performance in which she “invited audience members to look at her cervix with the aid of a speculum and flashlight”? “Reader,” Butler writes on Page 254, “if you have reached this point in the book, I am as grateful to you as I am wary of exasperating you with repetition.”
The book’s author at times falls for the binary “of two sides — American artists and the religious right.” In fact, the coalition of forces arrayed in response to the provocations of the 1980s and ’90s was more nuanced and their arguments more interesting than that.
At issue was not only the limits to freedom of expression but also who should pay for such extreme expression. In National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, the 1998 Supreme Court case over government funding of the arts — named for Karen Finley, the NEA Four artist who covered her naked body in chocolate — Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “Avant-garde artistes such as respondents remain entirely free to épater les bourgeois; they are merely deprived of the additional satisfaction of having the bourgeoisie taxed to pay for it.”
Culture War I brought the public into a battle over art as never before. Depending on how you look at it, the fight exposed art-world corruption and decadence or made worthy martyrs out of the vanguard champions of race, class and gender. In either case, the arts were the better for it.
Much has changed in the intervening decades. Performative transgressions have moved from bohemian redoubts to Drag Queen Story Hour. The misogyny of hip-hop group 2 Live Crew and the race hatred of rapper Sister Souljah are no more offensive than your average Tuesday on social media. In 2020, institutions such as museums that might have once championed free expression became the censors, delaying a controversial exhibition of work by the artist Philip Guston for several years.
This time, the response is not just defense but also counterattack. President Donald Trump has focused his second term on culture and the arts more than anyone expected and perhaps more than many would like. I have found myself fascinated by his interests and cheering on his cultural and architectural initiatives. Championing classical architecture over weather-beaten brutalism? I’ll take it. Restoring public monuments rather than tearing them down? Yes, please. A review of the Smithsonian’s presentation of American history? It’s been a long time coming.
Trump sold his presidency by taking on what he calls a “deep state” of unelected bureaucracy. Along the way, rather than leaving the direction of culture to a select few, he has helped return such debates to the popular arena. By Zeus, I am glad for the fight.
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