FurtherBunny writes "George W. Bush is arguably the most influential and controversial performance artist in the history of Western art. Born as the son of George HW Bush senior, he learned early on how politics works. After studying at Yale and Harvard, he chose politics as his medium for art. In the 80s, like many other artists of the time, he was influenced by the French postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard. He was particularly interested in the following passage in the book “Simulacra and Simulation”:

“Go and simulate a theft in a large department store: how do you convince the security guards that it is a simulated theft? There is no “objective” difference: the same gestures and the same signs exist as for a real theft; in fact the signs incline neither to one side nor the other. As far as the established order is concerned, they are always of the order of the real.”

Bush applied the same question to art, and concluded that there is no tangible difference between being a real artist and a simulated one, that is, someone who is deemed an artist by the virtue of what he does and someone who does what he does in order to be deemed an artist, as well as an object that is deemed art by the virtue of its substance and an object that is called art in order to give it substance. This inspired him to create art about simulation which could be called art by the virtue of its substance. For this substance to be objectively apparent to the art world, he figured it must take place in a world outside of it. The obvious choice for Bush was politics, that is, to become a simulated politician as political art.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?From =Index&review_id=100"