David Robbins (born 1957 in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin) is an American artist and writer who was one of the first to investigate the art world's entrance into the culture industry.
His work Talent, eighteen "entertainer's headshots" of contemporary artists including Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, Allan McCollum and others, is widely credited with announcing the age of the celebrity artist,[1] and The Ice Cream Social (1993–2008), a multi-platform project comprising a TV pilot for the Sundance Channel, a novella, installations, ceramics, and performance, has been cited by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist as pioneering the "expanded exhibition."
Subsequently relocating to Milwaukee he aligned his work with contexts and formats historically forsaken by the avant garde, positing the suburb as a frontier for art production and creating TV commercials for galleries.
After attending Brown University, Robbins was employed in the early 1980s by Andy Warhol, George Plimpton, and Diana Vreeland, during which years he educated himself about art by interviewing emerging artists such as Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, and Allan McCollum.
In later works such as The German Reunification Public Sculpture Competition (1991) and The Ice Cream Social (1993–2008), Robbins looked at political content through a comic lens.
Born of the new production and distribution opportunities of the digital era, High Entertainment encourages the "independent imagination" to apply art's experimentalism to mainstream forms such as commercial film and television.