The Perfect Moment sticks to its narrow lane, cloaked in beautiful sentences and metaphors but confined to debates surrounding censorship ... Our democracy was — and remains — a dialectical struggle. Butler laments current partisan rancor and lack of common purpose. What, then, does his look back signify? While The Perfect Moment is something of a sophomore slump, it ably and passionately underscores the legacy of the First Amendment, cornerstone of our Bill of Rights, besieged now as never before, and not just from Opus Dei Catholics and evangelical Protestants.
Tightly focused and purposive ... Replete with striking details all the way through ... A more precise subtitle for the book might have been 'Artists, Evangelists, Appointees, and the Unresolved Conflicts over Free Expression in American Public Life' ... Akin to the quilt that Butler saw firsthand as a young man: it brings together stories of art-world people whose undertakings might be otherwise forgotten.
Butler’s comprehensive book details the congressional efforts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, led by the bombastic North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms amid the early years of the AIDS crisis ... Leads readers on a meticulous tour through each successive controversy. He can get sidetracked into the wilderness of legal briefs and memoranda, but such detours usually emerge in the clearing ... Butler’s chronicle of these flash points is a reminder that the fights of the 1980s were not aberrations, but templates — ones that continue to shape the arguments we’re still having today.
A comprehensive overview of the religious right’s targeting of artists and arts funding in the 1980s and ’90s ... While disappointingly light on connections to present-day government censorship efforts, this nonetheless makes for a dramatic retelling of a sea change in American arts and politics.
