High Entertainment by David Robbins argues for a category of cultural production that combines the experimental ethos of art with the accessibility of entertainment.
High Entertainment eschews the specialised, exclusionary language on which art has increasingly come to depend, in favour of a communication model that extends and elevates the pop grammars to which we are exposed from our earliest years.
Bringing together a selection of essays, an interview, and an artwork which explore the development of this framework, this book touches upon four decades of Robbins' engagement with the idea of High Entertainment—starting from the 1980s, through its moment of clearest resolution with the advent of digital technology, all the way to the present.
The "Wiggle Room" series charts a range of practices that in their journey across the platforms, conditions, and constraints of the art context have created new frameworks within which to orient their productions, personas, and purposes.
David Robbins (born 1957 in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin) is an artist and writer who was one of the first to investigate the art world's entrance into the culture industry. His work has been exhibited worldwide. He is a long-standing contributor to magazines such as
Real Life,
Purple Prose and
Artforum.
