ARTBOOK BLOGEventsStore NewsMuseum Stores of the MonthNew Title ReleasesStaff PicksImage GalleryBooks in the MediaExcerpts & EssaysArtbook InterviewsEx LibrisAt First SightThe Artbook 2023 Gift GuidesArtbook Featured Image ArchiveArtbook D.A.P. Events ArchiveDATE 7/22/2024 Explore the influence of Islamic art and design on Cartier luxury objectsDATE 7/18/2024 Join us at the San Francisco Art Book Fair, 2024!DATE 7/18/2024 History and healing in Calida Rawles' 'Away with the Tides'DATE 7/16/2024 Join us at the Atlanta Gift & Home Summer Market 2024DATE 7/15/2024 In 'Gordon Parks: Born Black,' a personal report on a decade of Black revoltDATE 7/14/2024 Familiar Trees presents a marathon reading of Bernadette Mayer's 'Memory'DATE 7/11/2024 Early 20th-century Japanese graphic design shines in 'Songs for Modern Japan'DATE 7/8/2024 For 1970s beach vibe, you can’t do better than Joel Sternfeld’s ‘Nags Head’DATE 7/5/2024 Celebrate summer with Tony Caramanico’s Montauk Surf JournalsDATE 7/4/2024 For love, and for countryDATE 7/1/2024 Summertime Staff Picks, 2024!DATE 7/1/2024 Enter the dream space of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret CameronDATE 6/30/2024 Celebrate the extraordinary freedom of Cookie Mueller in this Pride Month Pick | EVENTSCORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/14/2024David Robbins talks to Andrew Swant about 'High Entertainment'On the occasion of his eighth book, High Entertainment, published by Reliable Copy, a Bangalore-based, artist-led publishing house, artist and writer David Robbins answers questions lobbed by Milwaukee filmmaker Andrew Swant. The two discuss Robbins’s concept of High Entertainment, a synthesis developed in writings and artworks across three decades.![]() ![]() ![]() ABOVE: Detail from “Talent,” 1986, a suite of eighteen headshot photographs of contemporary artists. Does high entertainment have a particular look or style? No. It’s an attitude toward communication and audience. And a self-conception. I’ve always been more interested in the artist than in art. The role of the artist has been my material from the first. How can we stretch it? What is the artist’s role today, when art is a branch of the entertainment-industrial complex? So are all artists supposed to go into show biz now? They’re enrolled in it from their first exhibition! Business civilization positions art as entertainment — intellectual showbiz, material-culture showbiz, entertainment for another audience and another wallet than popular culture’s. Historically, artists have engaged entertainment, as subject matter, critically or mockingly. We’re not in that era anymore. We’ve got different tools. Today entertainment, as subject, as vehicle, as pleasurable transaction, can be explored directly by independent-minded people who are beholden to neither art’s value system nor the entertainment industry’s. We’ve never had this kind of production-and-distribution technology at our disposal. Now that we have the opportunity, let’s see what we can invent. What if the artist stops denying art’s function as a kind of entertainment? How does the admission alter the artist’s cultural location? We have much to learn about entertainment. What is entertainment? What is it for? It’s “to entertain,” of course, but what goes on in that transaction? And how might we stretch and shape it? Entertainment research is the order of the day! Are you an “artist” or a one-man entertainment production company? The idea of high entertainment proposes a completely different model of the artist than is pervasive today. But that’s a good thing. The art context is today thoroughly compromised by capitalism. Thankfully, we have options to operating ironically and in Broodthaers’s “bad faith.” ![]() Our era has so many serious problems. Do you ever feel irresponsible promoting entertainment? Of course. Do I strike you as a simpleton? But artists embody complex coordinates. Crises don’t obviate the exploration of all other sides of life. They never have. The first world war rages and Malevich paints squares! ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |