George Santos, Performance Artist

The congressman from New York elected under the name George Santos never worked on Wall Street, never graduated from college, and was never even remotely Jew “ish.” He made it all up. But rather than (or rather in addition to) demonizing him for failing to adhere to the expectations of factual accuracy, we might examine him through the lens he has chosen for himself: art.

Humans love stories, especially ones that are made up. We read great works of literature precisely because they are fiction, not fact. In the early twentieth century, the Dada movement of performance artists set out to protest the reason, and logic of elite (and capitalist) society through irrationality, nonsense and theater of the absurd. What can the performance artist purportedly known as George Santos tell us about our current society?

Santos has presented wildly different aspects of himself as drag queen Kitara, financier Anthony Devolder, and pet savior Anthony Zabrovsky. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy doesn’t seem to care.

Perhaps McCarthy, and many voters, have come to accept that politics is as much about performance as it is substance. This is a particularly convenient posture if one’s political agenda is to obstruct rather than enact legislation. Santos is arguably just imitating other (con) artists who have gained political office through subterfuge and…