Biz kid.

I WORKED AT ANDY WARHOL ENTERPRISES FOR A LITTLE more than a year, from late '79 to early '81, a period when the Factory was located at Broadway and Seventeenth Street. Getting hired there was a stroke of good luck for a kid from Wisconsin (even if the job offer had resulted from a fancy social connection), and I beamed all of a twenty-two-year-old's energy at the opportunity. Weekdays I performed beginner's editorial tasks at Interview magazine, then at the peak of both its formal inventiveness and its social clout; at night I sometimes lugged equipment around for the company's lame TV version of the magazine; on Saturdays, volunteering for the unglamorous task of reorganizing the stacks of boxes and metal film canisters in the cluttered back rooms, I'd be employed by the studio side of the office. Those quiet afternoons it was often just business manager Vincent Fremont, Andy, and myself. When the master, working away at the latest portrait commission on the floor of his surprisingly tiny studio, requested the blue paint, I'd oblige, thinking, "I'm handing Andy Warhol blue paint." Evidently the boss felt comfortable enough having me around, because some evenings I'd be asked to accompany him to book signings or some other minor promotion of the Warhol product line. (The expressions on people's faces wherever Andy came into view--dumbstruck, incredulous ... like they'd glimpsed a friendly ghost.) Whenever I accompanied him on these missions, even if it was merely for the duration of a cab ride to his town house, he always handed me twenty dollars, and not just because he understood that any kid could find a use for some extra dough. He didn't want there to be any personal angle to our excursions. We weren't pals; he was the boss, I an employee, and together we were on the job.

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Although brief, my time at the Factory--and the exposure to its studio, publishing, and broadcasting ventures--confirmed in me two essential postwar American-kid instincts.

The postwar American kid's cultural imprinting is Entertainment first, and Art (if at all; we are not Europeans) second. Self-respect--telling the truth about the facts of the case, shall we say--commands the kid to acknowledge that while art may be capable of delivering certain satisfactions, television (for example) has delivered others. Different in kind, the two kinds of satisfaction need not be--indeed cannot be--ranked. Refusing to rank them isn't just an American thing, it's the heart of the American thing. To a kid raised in the US after the Second World War, then, the art context's traditional attitude of condescension toward all other categories of imaginative production will feel ill matched and inauthentic to his experience. That kid's story is as American as Warhol's own.

An imagination imprinted with the configuration of postwar American culture will generate, as naturally as breathing, ideas appropriate to the context of mass entertainment: movies, TV, pop music, books, and magazines. And here the Factory confirmed a second postwar-American-kid instinct--namely, to create in multiple formats (what the academics term an "interdisciplinary approach"). Not a discovery in itself, working in many formats has been with us a long time. Roy Lichtenstein, to take just a recent example, made paintings, sculpture, prints, and drawings. For all his range, though, Lichtenstein's production was assigned to a single context--the context of art. Warhol initiated a different, more complicated take on production. The first artist to implement the knowledge that, in the decentralized reality brought about by the distribution of cameras and tape recorders, what counts is not seizing the means of production but instead seizing the means of reproduction, Warhol fitted old desires to newly available technologies. He understood that the artist who picks up a Bolex and makes a 16 mm film has created a contextually ambiguous artifact that might deliver as art but may also be, well, a movie, and as such is something at least potentially absorbable by that vast, mainstream communication system built and maintained by the entertainment-industrial complex. Warhol intuited that the new, ready availability of inexpensive recording technologies underwrote a new attitude. He pivoted away from the modernist dialogue between art and life to gaze with fascination at a strange new triangulation comprising Art, Life, and a third category neither art nor life--Showbiz--that had fully developed values, rules, and icons of its own. Today's culture is organized around this complicated interplay.

Warhol played off contexts--art, life, showbiz--against each other for the high comedic tension it yielded. But Warhol's kids, propelled by technological innovation, have since moved beyond the old man's game. The computer, together with the myriad contraptions that plug into it, has bestowed an access more nearly total on those imaginations configured according to more contemporary relations among formats. The individual imagination can now make paintings and also create ... television. And movies. And pop-music CDs. We create directly in the languages of the pop motherland. No longer restricted to creating in "art" formats, we're evolving into contextually ambidextrous creatures increasingly adept at producing goods tailored to the packaging requirements of each specific context. Leaving behind Andy's immigrant discovery of America, we've set up mini-Factories in the home offices of another. Warhol played off the tension between contexts; the situation now emerging dissolves that tension. Stubborn distinctions between production, venue, and distribution are becoming confounded, and old barriers eroded. We've evolved from Warhol's insight into egalitarian consumption to the digital era's egalitarian production.

Gaining the fullest possible access to our imagination: It's a principle as American as a silk-screened painting of an apple pie. My role in this particular narrative has been to argue for this evolution before a conservative, resistant art world; the next generation will Just Do It. Already, though, we've arrived at a genuinely post-Warholian situation. For what is the location, culturally speaking, of someone who makes both paintings and not video art but television? What is the location, culturally speaking, of someone not only inclined but able to produce in both the art context and the entertainment context? Is that person still or necessarily an "artist"? If we're capable of tailoring content to format and context, need that multivarious production be unified, by concept or sensibility, as was Warhol's in his day? Truth is, it needn't. Legibility and continuity aren't requisites to the production of quality cultural work, the art world's views notwithstanding. The modernist, unified field of art production, to which Warhol was dedicated, is being superseded. The kids no longer require all their production to be art.

David Robbins is an artist and writer currently living in Los Angeles. A retrospective of his decade-long "Ice Cream Social" project opens at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris this month.