Press return to see results.
cmd / ctrl + k to open and close.
The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars by Isaac Butler. Bloomsbury Publishing. 384 pages. June 2026.
Earlier this year, I decided to pay a visit to the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, lately in the news for all the wrong reasons. Last June the museum’s director, Kim Sajet, stepped down after Trump announced, without authority, that she was “fired.” A month later the artist Amy Sherald—Michelle Obama’s official portraitist—canceled a planned retrospective due to concerns about censorship (Sherald had painted a trans Statue of Liberty). Then it emerged that the portrait of Trump in its “America’s Presidents” exhibition—by far the most popular display in the institution—had been swapped out, seemingly at his behest, and wall texts mentioning his impeachments removed. I saw the new portrait, flanked by security guards: a black-and-white photo of the scowling president standing in the Oval Office, fists on his desk. Its basic tombstone caption was in stark contrast to the long interpretive texts accompanying the portraits of every other president on view. Soon after, the display closed for refurbishment: Now all portraits of living presidents are accompanied by neutrally worded CV-style captions.
