Beyond Gimmicks
RENÉE E. D’AOUST teaches online at North Idaho College and Casper College, and is the managing editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Her first book, Body of a Dancer (Etruscan Press), was a ForeWord Reviews “Book of the Year” finalist. In 2017, she is an NEH Summer Scholar at the University of Washington’s “City, Urban: Environmental Urban Humanities” Summer Institute. She lives in Switzerland.
to refer to the current US president as a performance artist. In , David Remnick writes: “Insofar as [Trump] had political opinions, they were inconsistent and mainly another form of performance art, part of his talk-show patter.” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien has said, “He’s a performance artist pretending to be a great manager.” The New York Times Editorial Board writes that Trump’s antics paint a “portrait of ineptitude so surreal as to qualify as a kind of art, or maybe slapstick.” When applied to Trump, performance art implies condescension, a joke.
