“For readers who may be unfamiliar with the book, what I mean by High Entertainment is simply stated: Take the best aspects of the art and entertainment contexts—namely, art’s experimentalism and entertainment’s accessibility—and apply them toward a new synthesis. This isn’t pie-in-the-sky theory, it’s already happening. The digital revolution allows independent imaginations to experiment with mass media formats and distribute the results inexpensively. High Entertainment is a mutation—a type of creativity that doesn’t rely on either the production system of the entertainment context or the evaluative system of the art context. It’s an evolutionary step, already underway. We need to make the most of the opportunity it affords.Concrete Comedy similarly represents an evolution of our thinking about context. I’d contend that the very idea of pursuing a line of comedy within the art context, such as some of us have done, ought to be regarded as evidence of an emergent consciousness that perceives the art context not as the terminus point or limit of expression—the traditional view of it—but rather as but one production context available to an independent imagination at work within the larger cultural field. This mutation of perception was already present in my earliest exhibitions of comic objects in the mid-‘80s, when I instinctively positioned myself comedically rather than, in the art context sense, artistically. I didn’t know what I was doing, I was just doing it because it felt authentic.” David Robbins from an interview with Artbook
