An Artist Who Lived the Culture Wars Reads Them Again

Franklin Furnace, the New York arts organization founded 50 years ago, was once accused by the Morality Action Committee of showing pornography to 500 children a day. The committee made the claim in postcards mailed to legislators across the country, aimed at Carnival Knowledge, an exhibition of women artists exploring sexuality. The woman who founded Franklin Furnace has now revisited that era in a review for Hyperallergic, and her argument is blunt: the fight over creative expression in the United States is repeating itself.

She was reviewing The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars (2026), by critic and theater director Isaac Butler. According to her account, Butler is younger than she is and did not live through the Reagan-era battles himself. What pulled him to the subject, she writes, was a more recent alarm: in 2020, an exhibition of Philip Guston’s work was postponed by the Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Gallery of Art. The institutions feared the public might misread Guston’s paintings referencing the Ku Klux Klan. Against a current rise of right-wing legislators, politicians, and organizations targeting arts and culture, the reviewer argues, the story of the conservative players of the 1980s and ’90s needs telling.

The book, as she describes it, moves through the era’s flashpoints. One is the difficulty Martin Scorsese had producing The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which she attributes largely to Reverend Donald Wildmon’s innovation of mass mailing to Christians on behalf of his National Federation for Decency. Wildmon returns in Butler’s account of Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (1987), a photograph of a plastic crucifix in a beaker of the artist’s urine. In 1989, then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato ripped a reproduction of a catalog image of the work in half on the Senate floor.

The event that gives the book its title was the cancellation of The Perfect Moment, a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective, by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. By the mid-1980s, the reviewer notes, Mapplethorpe’s AIDS diagnosis was common knowledge. The show had traveled nationally, but its depiction of sadomasochism, Black nude models, and naked children was likely to provoke a reaction in the capital. On June 12, 1989, the Corcoran canceled the exhibition before it opened. Senator Jesse Helms and Sidney Yates, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, then fought over the funding of the National Endowment for the Arts itself. Butler, she writes, gives a balanced account of how both sides strategized and carried out their ambitions.

For New York readers, the review carries a particular weight. Franklin Furnace was drawn directly into that earlier fight, with postcards sent to lawmakers nationwide accusing it of showing pornography to children. The reviewer lived the consequences of that kind of campaign and now sees a pattern worth recognizing: the mailers have given way to other tools, but the target is the same.

Her recommendation is plain. Read Butler’s book, she suggests, for the stories that parallel our current fight to defend creative expression. With the museum world still living in the shadow of the Guston postponement she cites, the history she describes is not offered as nostalgia. It reads as a warning from someone who has seen how these confrontations tend to unfold.