Milan Kohout, "Running for President of the Czech Republic". Czech Rep., 2017.

Running for President of the Czech Republic. Czech Republic, 2017. Life-as-art performance: Milan Kohout
Photo: Milan Kohout’s archive
In Kohout’s words:
“I believe that especially now, when we are facing the possible extinction of our species on the Earth, it is necessary that all art be political. In my understanding there is no division between art, life and politics. Therefore I decided absolutely seriously to run for president of the Czech Republic as a performance piece.
“According Czech public TV, I was at that time among the top five candidates considered to be in the running.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS6xmBfGttU
List of candidates for president: http://www.volby18.cz/prezidentske-volby/
“Here is my presidential campaign video, featuring the Czech flag and an Afro-American saxo- phonist playing the Czech national anthem in the Boston subway (most Czechs are racists and xeno- phobes and do not want people of other races to ‘touch’ their national symbols).”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8NVspRqWHo
A letter from Milan Kohout rounding out and describing the whole performance: “Dear friends and comrades,
“today I have been compelled to conclude my deadly-seriously intended year-long durational per- formance, Running for president of the Czech Republic.”
“Unfortunately I was not able to collect the required number of signatures from citizens, represen- tatives, and senators, but of course in a few years, better prepared, I will run again and try to win.
“Despite the fact that I did not succeed this time, I consider this performance to be one of my most successful. In my pieces, I try to blend and connect art and life, and life and politics. By this, I intend to deviate in the most extreme way from the current understanding of art, an art which continually and increasingly prostitutes itself, selling itself on the capitalist market and adjusting all its organs to satisfy the tacky, merely decorative aesthetics of the market economy. In fact, art is the most ex- pensive and most highly-marketed form of value that human society has created through the course of evolution, and only with its help can human society survive into the future. It is value that has an ethical dimension.
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“It seems that the capitalist economic system has utterly clouded humanity’s mind with its self- destructive gluttony, and it is driving us to extinction on this small blue marble of ours, bobbing in the electromagnetic waves of the cosmos.
“Therefore, nowadays all art must be political and must be an authentically-lived experience, and every artist must be a revolutionary politician who tries to break the limbs of the illusions dancing before our eyes. A political artist, who longs as much as possible to get to the heart of the contem- porary political tragedy, so as to rid it of the rot of unscrupulous cancerous sleaziness.
“These days there is no time for a decorative art adorning the arrogance of blind, selfish, wealthy assholes, who are as attractive as shit for swarms of consumerist flies, longing their whole lives for nothing more than to inhale the stench of money!
“Today we must use art as the most potent weapon we have!!! “Good-bye until the next presidential election!!!”
— Milan Kohout