‘People are picking the dumbest fights’: the tortured history of America’s culture wars

In a new book, Isaac Butler goes back to the 1980s to trace how battles started against the arts, from Piss Christ to Mapplethorpe, and looks at what we can learn for today

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.