David Robbins is an artist and writer living in Shorewood, Wisconsin. Early in his career, he worked for art and fashion icons like Andy Warhol and Diana Vreeland and he quickly became accustomed to meeting up-and-coming artists of the time, including Richard Prince, Jenny Holzer, and Keith Haring. Much of his work probes the overlap between art and entertainment.

Talent (1986), for example, questions what it means to be a celebrity and what it takes to construct a public identity. And “Theme Song For An Exhibition” (2014) is a pop song that addresses the desire to make culture. According to Robbins, he uses “art institutions to produce and distribute work in popular culture forms that the popular culture isn’t producing. Wiring together art museums to create a kind of broadcast system breaks relations between high and mass art contexts, and resets them. Whatever else it is, ‘Theme Song For An Exhibition’ is contemporary American culture—American in that it’s organizing contexts horizontally instead of in the European manner, with art above and entertainment below.”

Robbins’s works were featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.