David Smith in The Guardian:
Isaac Butler is limbering up for an event at Politics and Prose, an independent bookshop and venerable Washington institution, but still has time to explain his arm tattoos.
They variously depict: a logo from his grandparents’ company in the 1960s; a satellite that his father worked on at Nasa; a “jaunty crab” for his wife, who finds crabs “hilarious”; an iris by Japan’s Utagawa Hiroshige for Butler’s daughter, Iris; a drawing of a scene from a production of The Seagull by the Russian theatre maker Konstantin Stanislavski; and an artwork by the American painter and photographer David Wojnarowicz that shows a house on fire.
Wojnarowicz emerges as an important player in Butler’s new book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars, a study of how the newly ascendant religious right pivoted from the cold war in the late 1980s to wage a domestic battle over contemporary art. It has earned praise from the actor of Ethan Hawke as a “scrupulously researched and blissfully told … gonzo history of American art and attrition”.
Sitting in the Politics and Prose owner’s office, where his books are neatly stacked for signing, Butler, 47, reflects: “It’s the birth of the modern culture wars. This is the first period where someone uses the term ‘culture war’ to describe what’s going on and so, to me, it’s like the world war one of the culture wars and we’re in the world war two right now. It is a very specific time where all art, all popular culture, is becoming politicised, is becoming a battleground, which is what we see happening again here.”
More here.
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