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Strategic bombing is an effective military strategy with the goal of weakening the enemy through the use of air, land or sea firepower. One of its main objectives is to demoralize the enemy so concessions will be made and the enemy conquered.

This battle strategy is now being used in the culture wars, as we saw last week in North Carolina prior to the repeal of House Bill 2 (the law prohibiting controversial bathroom policies from going into effect).

In his book, Rules for Radicals which many on the extreme left use as a guide for todays cultural battle plans author Saul Alinsky said: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.

And thats exactly what we saw last week in North Carolina: Threats of economic disaster heaped upon us from media outlets across the country, all before a crucial vote to repeal HB2. It was nothing less than strategic bombing, with the use of projected economic losses instead of proven economic gains.

The facts are that our state has thrived economically since the passing of HB2, yet those facts simply got in the way of the radical left. So they firebombed us with fake news to drum up our imagination that North Carolina was headed into the toilet if we kept the law in place.

The Washington Times even noted the strength of our economy since the passing of the bill with an article 10 days prior to the vote, headlined, Tourism thriving, economy expanding in North Carolina despite bathroom bill desertions.

Check out some of the facts from the article:

But just days before the vote, the AP circulated a new report that our state was going to suffer massive financial losses over a 12 year period, upward of $4 billion in revenue. And with that little missile of guile, the strategic bombing began.

Check out the headlines that immediately ran from around the country:

The list goes on. But suffice it to say none of these reported the facts from the Washington Times article, but only the threats from the AP analysis.

It was nothing less than strategic bombing and it worked.

Many of the same legislators who took a moral stand for the safety and privacy of women and children decided it was no longer politically expedient to do so, and they switched their votes. The law was repealed, yet with it came a four-year hold on cities being able to enact new bathroom policies to allow men in womens restrooms (a twist that angered everyone the radical left).

No matter where you stand on HB2 or the new law (HB 142), the reality is that strategic media bombing will be used on any moral issue the left wants to be overturned or enacted. So moving forward, be sure to pay attention and prepare to fight back.

And the best way to fight back is to simply tell the truth.

G.K. Chesterton once said, When deceit becomes universal, truth becomes a revolutionary act. Were praying for truth revolutionaries today ones willing to stand up and not back down when the strategic bombs start falling again.

Get your copy of the Benham brothers first book, Whatever the Cost: Facing Your Fears, Dying to Your Dreams, and Living Powerfully, right now!

Media wishing to interview Jason & David Benham, please contact media@wnd.com.

Go here to read the rest:
IN THE GAME - WND.com

We live in an era in which image memes are lobbed as political salvos. In which security is theater and defining who controls the narrative in a world of facts and alternative facts is the daily bread of the hot-take class. In which words are bombs, delivered in 140-character installments in the new culture war a phrase that can and has referred to all manner of cultural conflicts: The face-off between elite versus populists, urban versus rural, Hollywood versus the heartland.

Culture is a weapon a pretty effective one at that. And its a topic that New York-based curator Nato Thompson takes on in his book Culture as Weapon, which explores the ways the tools of culture are deployed to do everything from sell iPhones to wage war.

As far as timing goes, the books landing during the early days of the Trump administration couldnt have been more impeccable. Culture as Weapon provides a broad overview on how individuals, corporations and governments employ design, storytelling, imagery and art to stir emotion and mold sentiment. The prominence of the Internet and social media makes this all the more profound and far-reaching than in the past.

Thompsons book kicks off with an extensive historical primer. Over the course of the 20th century, the fields of public relations and advertising created visually resonant cultural icons such as the Marlboro Man to move merchandise. Thompson shows how political figures have employed those same techniques to sway elections and stoke fear. For example: the 1988 presidential campaign ad for George H.W. Bush about Willie Horton, the Massachusetts convict who raped a woman while on furlough an ad that ignited anxiety about crime (and African American men) and likely cost Michael Dukakis the election.

Thompson also provides a backgrounder on how visual symbols have been historically wielded socially and politically. The Nazis, for example, were famously meticulous about their aesthetics. Adolf Hitler himself devoted great care and attention to the design and look of the Nazi flag.

The Nazis loved culture, notes Thompson. They used culture. They distributed culture. Cinema, music, flags, banners, book burnings, rallies, and holidays were all deployed in a phantasmagoria of stark blood red, swastikas, and blinding white.

Interestingly, political groupshave also been perfectly happy to co-opt the symbols of those they impugn. Hitlers propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, decried so-called degenerate art anything Modernist or made by Jews even as he put that art on view in an extraordinarily well-attended touring exhibition titled, naturally, Degenerate Art.

A similar phenomenon occurred during the U.S. culture wars of the 1980s and 90s, when Congress attacked some of the artists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA hubbub, writes Thompson, was an opportunity to condemn luridness and bask in it in equal measure. An artists own work weaponized against him. (The Trump administrations proposed budget cuts are part of a long-running conservative animosity toward the NEA.)

The look back is interesting, and Thompson delivers priceless instances of cultural manipulation, such as when the American Tobacco Co. used the trappings of womens liberation to encourage women to smoke in the late 1920s.

But far more vital are the chapters the author devotes to the recent past and the present to the ways in which big business and government have liberally borrowed from culture for their purposes. (He comes at these topics from the left, with a healthy skepticism of capitalism and its habit of turning everything into sellable merch.)

Thompson examines how art and architecture have been used as an implement of urban development, via so-called starchitectural development projects and family-friendly public art installations such as Cows on Parade. The commodification of bohemia, as he calls it, has led to art being viewed as an engine rather than the cultural mirror of a nation. The NEAs motto, for example, has gone from Because a great nation deserves great art to Art works a model that would no longer be focused on excellence based on taste, writes Thompson, but rather on the way that culture could make things happen.

This, interestingly, has led to an increasing mistrust toward the idea of culture itself. Los Angeles offers a vivid (but not included) case in point: The anti-gentrification efforts in Boyle Heights have specifically targeted art galleries.

Culture as Weapon covers myriad other topics: How the U.S. military employed cultural anthropologists during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, how staged social relationships are as intriguing to artists as they are to corporations, and how culture informs our everyday retail experiences. (The layout of Ikea is inspired, in part, by the ramps of Frank Lloyd Wrights Guggenheim Museum in New York.)

In taking on so much disparate material, Culture as Weapon can feel scattered and often delves into topics that the reader is likely already familiar with. (Do we need to read again of the improbable rise of the personal computer from Steve Jobs garage to our back pocket?)

Thompson is at his most effective when he is dissecting what it is about culture that makes it such a potent social tool. Art, in its appeal to emotion, can override rationality. Fear, he writes, motivates faster than hope and appeals to emotion do not rely on the truth.

How the rational brain might counter the barrage of cultural string-pulling that we experience on a daily basis, and how the world of culture might save itself from becoming a mere tool, Thompson doesnt say. But Culture as Weapon provides a compelling manual for determining how the manipulation begins.

See the rest here:
Curator Nato Thompson shines a light on art and the culture wars in 'Culture as Weapon' - The Missoulian

On 1 February this year, eager crowds streamed through the doors of the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo smartphone-wielding teens and school groups in the afternoon, adults in the evening. It was the museums 129th birthday and there were queues to see the museums most celebrated and precious exhibit, the 14th-century Sarajevo Haggadah. Many brought their children or their children brought them. One father with his young son told me that, after a tiring day at work, he had secretly hoped his son might forget about visiting the museum, but here they were, making their way to the displays exploring Bosnias medieval past. Museum staff gave up counting after 5,000 visitors.

It has been nearly a year and a half since the museum, known locally as the Zemaljski Muzej, reopened. It had been closed for three years owing to the reluctance of Bosnias central state politicians to deal with the legal status of state-level cultural institutions that had existed in pre-war Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and with their consequent lack of funding. More than 20 years after the end of the war, these questions are still unresolved.

Watching the enthusiastic crowds, one might be forgiven for thinking the museums troubles were over. But the forces that led to its closure have changed little in the intervening period. While it has become common to talk of the positive role of cultural heritage in bringing about post-conflict reconciliation, the case of the Zemaljski Muzej offers a bitter example of how contentious cultural heritage can be and of how the politics of cultural exclusivism persists, despite two decades of international efforts to reverse this trend.

The Zemaljski Muzej, which houses some of Bosnia-Herzegovinas greatest cultural treasures, with collections of international importance, has survived two world wars and the 199296 Siege of Sarajevo. The Bosnian War was a conflict in which the aggressive pursuit of mono-ethnicity targeted not only the cultural heritage of unwanted groups during vicious campaigns of ethnic cleansing, but also those institutions which symbolised a common Bosnian identity and cultural patrimony, evidence of a long history of diversity and coexistence. The Zemaljski Muzej was among these institutions.

Founded in 1888 by Bosnia-Herzegovinas Austro-Hungarian administration, the Zemaljski Muzej grew into an interdisciplinary research and educational centre that played a major role in the development of Austria-Hungarys new colony. After the Second World War it thrived and evolved in socialist federal Yugoslavia to become Bosnia-Herzegovinas national museum and its foremost research and collecting institution.

After the outbreak of the Bosnian War, the museum, set on the boulevard that notoriously came to be called Sniper Alley, found itself on the frontline and the focus of constant shelling and sniping. Throughout the Siege of Sarajevo, the Zemaljski Muzejs dedicated (and multi-ethnic) staff came to the museum every day, determined to preserve its collections as best they could in deteriorating conditions. When I first visited the museum in March 1995, snow was falling through a hole in the shell-ravaged dome of the entrance hall and I accompanied the keeper of natural sciences, Svjetoslav Obratil, on his morning round to collect the snipers bullets from Bosnian Serb lines that had pierced exhibition rooms the night before.

By the end of the war, the museums staff was half of what it had been at the start, its elegant, turn-of-the-century neoclassical buildings were badly damaged and leaking, and its collections were at risk. Against the odds, the museum continued to function. Although its buildings were restored with outside aid and links with international experts were revived, there was no clear answer to the most significant challenge ahead: how would it survive the power-sharing arrangements between Bosnia-Herzegovinas three constituent peoples Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (Muslims) which came with the Dayton Peace Agreement in December 1995?

The Dayton Agreement divided the country into two entities: Bosnian Serb-dominated Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (subdivided into 10 Muslim- or Croat-majority cantons). Most powers, including responsibility for culture, were devolved to the entities at the expense of the central state. In the world of Republika Srpskas officialdom, still led by hardline nationalist politicians, anything that strengthened Bosnia-Herzegovina at state level particularly culturally was detrimental to the interests of Bosnian Serbs. Republika Srpska is currently the fiefdom of Milorad Dodik and his SNSD party. Once held as a moderate by Western powers, Dodik has revealed himself a nationalist whose secessionist rhetoric is regarded as the principal threat to Bosnia-Herzegovinas stability.

There was a lack of clarity in the Dayton Agreement on many issues that arose in the new post-war state. One thing was clear, however there was to be no state-level Ministry of Culture. Where interaction in cultural activities was unavoidable in the international arena, the Ministry of Civil Affairs had responsibility. But, depending from which national group and political party the minister came, post holders had the ability to undermine support for state-level cultural institutions that represented Bosnia-Herzegovina as a whole.

Among the ethno-national political elites who now held power, only the Bosniaks maintained the idea of a unified state and a common identity for Bosnia-Herzegovina. Though under the terms of Dayton, Sarajevo was the declared capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, for nationalist ideologues the city was merely the capital for Bosnias Muslims, as Banja Luka was for Serbs, and Mostar for Croats. Funding for Sarajevo-based institutions was the responsibility of Sarajevo Canton with no relevance for the citizens of Republika Srpska or Croat-dominated cantons despite the presence of thousands of returnees of different ethnicities to the homes from which they had been ethnically cleansed.

From 2007 until 2015 Sredoje Novi, a Bosnian Serb and a close political ally of Milorad Dodik, held the post of Minister of Civil Affairs. The Sarajevo-based state-level institutions that spoke of a shared Bosnian cultural heritage were anathema to him. In 2010 a representative of Novi stated that there were no state institutions of culture in Bosnia-Herzegovina, that culture was in the control of the entities, and that the Ministry of Civil Affairs was not in charge of financing cultural institutions.

Along with six other state-level cultural institutions, the Zemaljski Muzej fell into a budgetary gap that ethno-nationalist politicians eagerly exploited. Among them were the National Art Gallery, the Historical Museum, and the National and University Library that same National Library whose destruction in August 1992 by incendiary shells from Bosnian Serb artillery had aroused worldwide condemnation and led to a long-running UNESCO-led fundraising campaign. Now the ideology that had underpinned the destruction of cultural heritage during the war continued, through political manoeuvring, into the peace.

On 4 October 2012, the Zemaljski Muzejs status and funding was still not settled and its staff had not been paid in more than a year. The museums then director, Adnan Busuladi, announced that the museum would close to the public until its situation was resolved. Photographs of the planks nailed across the museums entrance went round the world.

Photo: Martin A. Doe/Alamy Stock Photo

For almost three years the museums management and staff were subjected to public accusations broadcast widely in the media of mismanagement, incompetence, negligence, and worse, from politicians and well-known cultural figures. There were legal challenges and formal prosecutorial investigations. As the accusations continued, negative perceptions of the museum grew surely the museum must be guilty of something? Yet far from abandoning their responsibilities, hidden from the public gaze, staff continued to go to the museum, working a rota of shifts at the museum day and night to guard and care for the collections.

While a number of campaigns highlighted the plight and importance of the museum, it was the Bosnian cultural NGO Akcijas Ja sam Muzej (I am the Museum) campaign that captured the imagination of the public, transforming perceptions of the museum. Inspired by the dedication of the museum workers carrying out their rota of unpaid guard duties, the most successful part of the campaign was perhaps its Shift at the Museum, in which prominent public figures, along with international diplomats and ordinary citizens of Sarajevo, worked a shift at the museum and made it accessible to the public.

Yet though Ja sam Muzej was hugely effective in renewing public interest in the importance of the museum, it was the appearance in early 2015 of new actors on the scene with political clout, which ultimately brought about its reopening. Most prominent were the incoming US Ambassador Maureen Cormack and Adil Osmanovi, the new Minister of Civil Affairs, appointed by the recently-elected Bosniak-led government. A solution to the problems of Bosnia-Herzegovinas national museum began to look more hopeful.

Osmanovi swiftly insisted on the importance of the Zemaljski Muzej to all Bosnia-Herzegovina and announced plans for a concrete proposal to resolve the problems of the seven state-level institutions. These culminated at a well-orchestrated event on 15 September 2015, where in the presence of a host of dignitaries, including Prime Minister Denis Zvizdi and Ambassador Cormack, the Zemaljski Muzej officially reopened to crowds of enthusiastic balloon-waving schoolchildren. Ambassador Cormack announced a large grant of US $625,000 from the US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation for preventive conservation of the Zemaljski Muzejs collections. Earlier the same day, a memorandum of understanding had been signed in parliament ensuring financial support for the seven state-level cultural institutions until 2018. The support, however, came solely from Bosniak majority cantons and municipalities in the Federation not from Croat-majority cantons, and certainly not from Republika Srpska.

It did not take long for politicians from Republika Srpska, led by Osmanovis own deputy, ore Milievi, to attack both the memorandum of understanding and the appointment of temporary management boards for the seven cultural institutions, which they denounced as illegal. Complaints from Republika Srpskas entity cultural institutions followed. The director of the entitys National Museum in Banja Luka expressed outrage at Osmanovis favouritism, granting millions to Sarajevo cultural institutions, while those in Republika Srpska received crumbs. She omitted to mention that, unlike the Zemaljski Muzej, entity cultural institutions receive their entire operating budget from the entity authorities anything that comes from the central state budget is extra.

Osmanovi continues to defend the seven institutions as indisputable legal state-level institutions from the former Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina that preserve the cultural heritage of all the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He reminds his opponents that the constitution, in theory, incurs an obligation to maintain the state-level institutions that had operated up until the signing of the Dayton Agreement.

Under its acting director, Mirsad Sijari, a conservation centre has opened at the museum and financial support from the French Embassy to enable the Sarajevo Haggadah to be on permanent display has been announced. In April 2016 the Zemaljski Muzej and Akcija jointly won a prestigious European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage/Europa Nostra Award for, Sijari told me, doing the very work for which the politicians and the media had condemned them. The museums legal status and the source of its operating funding remain uncertain.

Helen Walasek is the author of Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage (Routledge). She was deputy director of Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue (BHHR) for which she worked from 199498.

From the April 2017 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Read more here:
Culture wars in Bosnia - Apollo Magazine

We live in an era in which image memes are lobbed as political salvos. In which security is theater and defining who controls the narrative in a world of facts and alternative facts is the daily bread of the hot-take class. In which words are bombs, delivered in 140-character installments in the new culture war a phrase that can and has referred to all manner of cultural conflicts: The face-off between elite versus populists, urban versus rural, Hollywood versus the heartland.

Culture is a weapon a pretty effective one at that. And its a topic that New York-based curator Nato Thompson takes on in his latest book, Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life, which explores the ways in which the tools of culture are deployed to do everything from sell iPhones to wage war.

As far as timing goes, the books landing during the early days of the Trump administration couldnt have been more impeccable. Culture as Weapon provides a broad overview on how individuals, corporations and governments employ design, storytelling, imagery and art to stir emotion and mold sentiment. The prominence of the Internet and social media, naturally, makes this all the more profound and far-reaching than in the past.

Thompsons book kicks off with an extensive historical primer. Over the course of the 20th century, the fields of public relations and advertising have created visually resonant cultural icons such as the Marlboro Man to move merchandise. Thompson shows how political figures have employed those same techniques to sway elections and stoke fear. For example: the 1988 presidential campaign ad for George H.W. Bush about Willie Horton, the Massachusetts convict who raped a woman while on furlough an ad that ignited anxiety about crime (and African American men) and likely cost Michael Dukakis the election.

Thompson also provides a backgrounder on how visual symbols have been historically wielded socially and politically. The Nazis, for example, were famously meticulous about their aesthetics. Adolf Hitler himself devoted great care and attention to the design and look of the Nazi flag.

The Nazis loved culture, notes Thompson. They used culture. They distributed culture. Cinema, music, flags, banners, book burnings, rallies, and holidays were all deployed in a phantasmagoria of stark blood red, swastikas, and blinding white.

Interestingly, political groups, such as the Nazis, have also been perfectly happy to co-opt the symbols of those they impugn. Hitlers propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, decried so-called degenerate art anything Modernist or made by Jews even as he put that art on view in an extraordinarily well-attended touring exhibition titled, naturally, Degenerate Art.

A similar phenomenon occurred during the U.S. culture wars of the 1980s and 90s, when Congress attacked some of the artists funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA hubbub, writes Thompson, was an opportunity to condemn luridness and bask in it in equal measure. An artists own work weaponized against him. (The Trump administrations proposed budget cuts are part of a long-running conservative animosity toward the NEA.)

The look back is interesting, and in the process Thompson delivers priceless instances of cultural manipulation, such as when the American Tobacco Co. used the trappings of womens liberation to encourage women to smoke in the late 1920s.

But far more vital are the chapters that the author devotes to the recent past and the present to the ways in which big business and government have liberally borrowed from culture for their purposes. (These are topics he comes at from the left, with a healthy skepticism of capitalism and its habit of turning everything into sellable merch.)

Thompson examines how art and architecture have been used as an implement of urban development, via so-called starchitectural development projects and family-friendly public art installations such as Cows on Parade. The commodification of bohemia, as he calls it, has led to art being viewed as an engine rather than the cultural mirror of a nation. The NEAs motto, for example, has gone from Because a great nation deserves great art to Art works a model that would no longer be focused on excellence based on taste, writes Thompson, but rather on the way that culture could make things happen.

This, interestingly, has led to an increasing mistrust toward the idea of culture itself. Los Angeles certainly offers a vivid case in point: The anti-gentrification efforts in Boyle Heights have specifically targeted art galleries (though, curiously, Thompson doesnt mention them).

Culture as Weapon covers myriad other topics: How the U.S. military employed cultural anthropologists during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, how staged social relationships are as intriguing to artists as they are to corporations, and how culture informs our everyday retail experiences. (The maze-like layout of Ikea is inspired, in part, by the disorienting ramps of Frank Lloyd Wrights Guggenheim Museum in New York.)

In taking on so much disparate material, Culture as Weapon can feel scattered and often delves into topics that the reader is likely already familiar with. (Do we really need another overview that covers the improbable rise of the personal computer from Steve Jobs garage to our back pocket?)

Instead Thompson is at his most effective when he is dissecting what it is about culture that makes it such a potent social tool.

Art, in its appeal to emotion, can override rationality, he notes. Fear, he writes, motivates faster than hope and appeals to emotion do not rely on the truth.

How the rational brain might counter the barrage of cultural string-pulling that we experience on a daily basis, and how the world of culture might save itself from becoming a mere tool, Thompson doesnt say. But Culture as Weapon provides a compelling manual for determining how the manipulation begins.

::

Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life

by Nato Thompson

Melville House: 288 pp., $27

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carolina.miranda@latimes.com

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Curator Nato Thompson shines a light on art and the culture wars in 'Culture as Weapon' - Los Angeles Times

President Donald Trump's proposed budget calls for the complete elimination of the National Endowment of the Arts, much to the delight of many conservatives, who will tell you, with anger unabated after nearly 30 years, about the "Mapplethorpe" exhibit and a photo called "Piss Christ."

The year was 1989. The right's effort to defund the NEA, founded as part of former president Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, was well underway, but mostly as a spending issue, something to be cut, disliked by the administration of Ronald Reagan but not necessarily loathed.

"In the 1980s," Reagan biographer Craig Shirley said, "the NEA was seen as little more than an irritant and not an agent for political or social change."

After all, Shirley said, Reagan was a "patron of the arts" and a former actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild. Eventually, he merely proposed cuts to its budget.

"The transition team really did want to defund it," W. Barnabas McHenry, former vice chairman of the Presidential Task Force on the Arts & Humanities under Reagan, told the New York Times in 1988. "So, we put a lot of people on the task force, like Charlton Heston and Adolph Coors, who were close to the President, and we all thought the task force did finally persuade him that it would be a terrible thing to stop the federal support."

"In the 1980s, the economy is in bad shape, the military is in bad shape, the Soviet Union is looming," Shirley said. "So, when people wake up in the morning, they're not thinking of the NEA and art they think is obscene. They're thinking about getting a job; they're thinking about the potential of World War III."

The end of the '80s, however, was a "time of relative peace," which Shirley said is when "people turn their eyes to something like the NEA."

There long had been "a perception that a lot of liberal causes and a lot of liberal art was being promoted by the NEA," he said.

But the passion to do away with the organization had yet to become a fever.

Then came "Piss Christ" by Catholic artist Andres Serrano, a snapshot of Jesus Christ on the crucifix, soaking in the artist's urine. It debuted quietly in New York in 1987 but caused uproar two years later it was shown in Virginia on a tour partially funded by an NEA grant.

"The Virginia Museum should not be in the business of promoting and subsidizing hatred and intolerance. Would they pay the KKK to do a work defaming blacks?" one museum-goer wrote in a letter to the Richmond Free Press.

The Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of what is now called the American Family Foundation, sent a letter to every member of Congress, according to "Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century." "I would never, ever have dreamed that I would live to see such demeaning disrespect and desecration of Christ in our country that is present today," he wrote. "Maybe, before the physical persecution of Christians begins, we will gain the courage to stand against such bigotry."

Conservative Sens. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Alphonse D'Amato, R-N.Y., took to the Senate floor in May 1989 "to question the NEA's funding procedures." Helms said Serrano is "not an artist, he is a jerk," and D'Amato theatrically tore a reproduction of the work to shreds, calling it a "deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity." Meanwhile, more than 50 senators and 150 representatives contacted the NEA to complain about the exhibits.

Serrano still remembers being "shocked" by the angry reaction and, he recently said, how suddenly the work became a "political football."

"I was born and raised a Catholic and have been a Christian all my life," he said. "My work is not meant to be blasphemous nor offensive. ... It was very surreal to see myself become the object of a controversy and national debate I did not intend."

Regardless of Serrano's intentions, the religious right's crusade against the NEA had begun.

But the exhibit that pushed Helms over the edge was a retrospective of work by late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who Andrew Hartman, author of "A War for the Soul Of America: A History of the Culture Wars," wrote "became the Christian Right's bte noire."

After being displayed with little fanfare in Chicago and Philadelphia, "The Perfect Moment" was set to arrive at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington on July 1, 1989, four months after Mapplethorpe died at 42 due to complications from HIV/AIDS.

Like the exhibit containing "Piss Christ," it was partially, indirectly funded by the NEA.

The exhibit featured 175 photographs. One hundred and sixty-eight were inoffensive, such as images of carefully arranged flowers. The seven from his "X-Portfolio," though, were intensely provocative. One presented a finger inserted into a penis. Another was as self-portrait showing Mapplethorpe graphically inserting a bullwhip into his anus. Two displayed nude children.

The exhibit so enraged Helms that he mailed reproductions of four offending images, including one of a prepubescent girl exposing herself and one of a naked boy, to several senators in what The Post called "Helm's 'Indecent Sampler.'" That outrage quickly spread.

"Mao is dead," as author Todd Gitlin described the moment. "Now Mapplethorpe is the devil king."

One person who viewed the exhibit wrote in a museum registry, "I've been here four times already and this show disgusts me more each time I see it."

Amid the outcry, the Corcoran canceled the exhibit to avoid being involved in the fight over the NEA's funding of the work, as Corcoran Director Christina Orr-Cahall said at the time.

Nearly 1,000 gathered outside the museum to protest the cancellation. They projected 50-foot enlargements of Mapplethorpe's work on the gallery wall from 17th Street. "We're giving him his show," artist Rockne Krebs said.

Meanwhile, as Hartman told The Post, "There were probably hundreds of thousands of phone calls and letters made about these issues to congressmen."

The House quickly cut $45,000 from the NEA's proposed budget, "the exact amount of the two grants that funded Mapplethorpe and Serrano," The Post reported in 1989.

Fueled by outrage, Helms sponsored a bill, which passed, to bar the NEA from using funds to "promote, disseminate or produce obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts, or material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or nonreligion."

This pair of controversies transformed the NEA into a political symbol and brought it front and center in "The Culture Wars," which Pat Buchanan called "as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself."

"We are not going to give the money to aging hippies anymore to desecrate the crucifix or do other strange things," stated Duncan D. Hunter, R-Calif., in 1997. Dick Armey , R-Texas, called the organization, "the single most visible and deplorable black mark on the arts in America that I have seen in my lifetime."

As then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., would say in that same year, calls to defund the organization weren't just about government spending but about fighting "an elite group who wants the Government to define that art is good." It was a common theme. Two years earlier, Gingrich said about the NEA on C-SPAN, "I'm against self-selected elites using your tax money and my tax money to pay off their friends."

Even the NEA in its own written history acknowledged that this was the point the anti-NEA sentiment became an issue of values. "To many the names Serrano and Mapplethorpe were now tokens of moral corruption inside the agency."

Conservatives found the exhibits so deplorable that they still talk about them decades later as among the reasons for abolishing the NEA.

In February, Frontpage magazine published a piece titled "Lefties freak out of over that Trump may cut funds for 'Piss Christ' agency." In an op-ed Wednesday, conservative columnist George F. Will invoked the photograph. It also appeared in an op-ed arguing against NEA funding, published Monday morning in the American Spectator. Both artists are mentioned several times in a Heritage Foundation article titled "Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment of the Arts." In a piece about the NEA's "top 10 crazy grants," the Washington Times sarcastically called "Piss Christ," "an oldie but goodie."

Still, the NEA has avoided defunding, in part because the right has never been ascendant in both the Congress and the White House and also because these controversies "really scared" the NEA, said Hartman, which he said has mostly avoided funding controversial art since.

It may survive this storm too.

The NEA, said Hartman, "has been so smart about the types of programs that they fund, because they placed them all over the country, so just about everyone in Congress has constituents who benefit" from the its largesse.

California State Poet Laureate and former chairman of the NEA Dana Gioia recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "The NEA Shakespeare program, for example, has helped bring professional stage productions to 3,900 towns, mostly small and midsize communities. ... It has provided millions of high school students with a chance to experience live theater, most of them for the first time."

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Behind NEA and the culture wars: A pair of 'despicable' exhibits ... - The Daily Progress