barely P:from a review of a video art exhibition in London

[Mark Kohut]

This was how the novelist Philip Roth saw Nixon as early as 1960, in an essay lamenting the plight of the novelist in a country that (and this is 43 years ago) seemed to be exceeding all bounds of plausibility, making fiction redundant. The most spectacular example of this was the sight of Nixon on television: "Perhaps as a satiric literary creation, he might have seemed 'believable'," wrote Roth, "but I myself found that on the TV screen, as a real public figure, a political fact, my mind balked at taking him in." 

As it turned out, American novelists rose to the challenge. Paranoia and conspiracy theory structure the fiction of Pynchon and DeLillo. Nixon inspired more cultural achievement than any other American president: the paranoid style in 1970s cinema, from The Conversation to Taxi Driver, constitutes a Nixon cycle. He even inspired an opera. But his contribution to the birth of video art is less well known.