Quotable Talk | Isaac Butler

In 1989 the Corcoran Gallery canceled The Perfect Moment, a touring Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective. In The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars, Isaac Butler argues that the fight that followed, over obscenity, the NEA and public money, set the terms for battles still being fought. Butler, a cultural critic and theater director, wrote The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and co-wrote The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history of Angels in America. The story is partly his own. He grew up in Washington, and his mother's first meeting on the board of the Washington Project for the Arts included the vote on whether to take the show. Sarasota Art Museum welcomes him as a guest of its Quotable series.