ARTBOOK BLOGEventsStore NewsMuseum Stores of the MonthNew Title ReleasesStaff PicksImage GalleryBooks in the MediaExcerpts & EssaysArtbook InterviewsEx LibrisAt First SightThe Artbook 2024 Gift GuidesArtbook Featured Image ArchiveArtbook D.A.P. Events ArchiveDATE 1/14/2025 Join us at the Atlanta Gift & Home Winter Market 2025DATE 1/2/2025 Wishing You the Beauty of the MysteriousDATE 12/31/2024 Happy New Year from Artbook | D.A.P.DATE 12/26/2024 An ode to holiday pleasuresDATE 12/24/2024 Happy Holidays from Artbook | D.A.P.DATE 12/18/2024 BMCM+AC presents David Silver on 'The Farm at Black Mountain College'DATE 12/17/2024 Good news for open mindsDATE 12/14/2024 A fascinating new study of Helen Frankenthaler & Co.DATE 12/12/2024 Donlon Books presents the London launch of 'More Than the Eyes: Art, Food and the Senses'DATE 12/12/2024 A fresh new take on Black Mountain CollegeDATE 12/8/2024 The Primary Essentials presents a book signing with JJ ManfordDATE 12/8/2024 ‘Larry Sultan & Mike Mandel: Evidence’ is back in print at last!DATE 12/7/2024 Artbook at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles Bookstore presents Chloe Sherman on 'Renegades San Francisco: The 1990s' | 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! DATE 12/23/2015 INTERVIEW with 'Cooking for Artists' author Mina Stone! |