We enter Clark Whittington’s basement studio through his garage, picking our way around bicycles, cigarette vending machines in various states of disassembly, and his 1955 Chevy.

“You hungry?” Whittington asks as he grabs himself a bite-size candy bar from a vending machine just outside his office.

Inside, we sit at a 1950s dinette table and chairs. I face a long wall of hundreds of primary-color plastic bins, stacked tall and holding bite-size art in boxes the size of a pack of cigarettes.

It feels like a basement playroom where someone’s mom has neatly organized all the toys, but this is headquarters for an international phenomenon, Art-o-mat. Close to ninety of Whittington’s creations - refurbished cigarette machines dispensing original art for five dollars - are stationed in galleries, museums, and shops across the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and most recently Austria. One year, the Art-o-mat housed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York was the museum’s highest-grossing item in its retail shop.

This year, as Art-o-mat marks its tenth anniversary, Whittington has some decisions to make.

“I always said that when I got to one hundred machines, I would stop,” he says. It’s either that or step up the whole operation, hire some more people, maybe open a storefront gallery. It’s a tough call for Whittington, a jeans-and-T-shirt guy who prides himself on the grassroots nature of his enterprise, which he sees largely as a way to promote and support artists.

“The world views this as a business, because money changes hands, but I never intended it that way.”

Encouraging daily consumption Whittington and his wife, Julie, moved to Winston-Salem from the Chapel Hill area ten years ago. He worked as a graphic artist and stylist for a local advertising firm, where he shared a love for things nerdy and retro with the art director. In July 1997, he held a show of thirteen conceptual pieces at Penny Universitie, the precursor to Mary’s Of Course café. One piece was a cigarette machine that dispensed his black-and-white photographs for a dollar.

His inspiration, he says, wasn’t so much the politics around smoking or the recently banned machine sales of cigarettes. Instead, it was a friend’s comment about how the crinkle of cellophane - as in opening a fresh pack of smokes or a six-pack of cheese crackers - caused a Pavlovian reaction, making him crave a snack. When Whittington’s show closed, café owner Cynthia Giles asked him to leave the machine because her customers loved it. He convinced some local artists to contribute their work, and Artists in Cellophane was born.

“It’s based on the concept of taking art and repackaging it to make art part of our daily lives,” Whittington writes on his Web site, artomat.org. “The mission of Artists in Cellophane is to encourage art consumption by combining the worlds of art and commerce in an innovative form. A.I.C. believes that art should be progressive, yet personal and approachable. What better way to do this than with a heavy cold steel machine?”

Not everyone embraced his ideas, or his sense of humor, in the early days. He remembers getting coffee at Morning Dew and hearing people critique what he was doing, “like they were intellectual and I was commercial.”

The big break came in 1999, when National Public Radio aired a piece on Art-o-mat during a “Morning Edition” show.

“People at work were like, ‘Hey! I heard you on the radio!’ I came home to thirty calls on our answering machine,” Whittington remembers.

One of those calls was the Whitney Museum.

“They got it,” Whittington says. “To this day, they still get it, unlike some people who want to manipulate the project.” As Robert Tofolo, the museum’s retail director, told ARTnews this past spring, “It gives us a chance to offer our visitors a piece of original artwork. Picking the artist, pulling the handle - it’s more than a purchase. It’s an experience.”

The close to four hundred artists now contributing to Art-o-mat earn great exposure as much as anything. Whittington pays them $2.50 per piece, which typically sell in the machines for $5. “You may make only fifty dollars a year, but your art goes to twenty different venues around the country,” Whittington says.

“Americans love to hold things, they love to own things,” he adds. “That physical touch sometimes results in a nice e-mail to the artist, and sometimes in a commission.” Top-selling Art-o-mat pieces over the years include a pewter-cast soda cracker, a miniature mobile, and miniature sculptures. One North Carolina woman has collected more than two hundred Art-o-mat pieces featuring faces, Whittington says. “I’m exporting Winston-Salem around the world, because every machine says ‘Artists in Cellophane, Winston-Salem, N.C.’ “

The day after we meet, Whittington flies to Los Angeles to install a machine in a trendy clothing and gift shop, Reform School. He enjoys these trips. Sometimes he’ll meet a few of the contributing artists; he often hears positive testimonials.

But it’s hard to picture Whittington hobnobbing with the West Coast arts crowd. He seems so at home in the garage of his split-level house, tucked in a quiet neighborhood off Peace Haven Road. A mountain biker, he has assembled all of his bikes, even outfitting one to carry A.I.C. boxes for shipping so he can get some exercise and save on gas. (Whittington continues to do graphic design for one client, Mock Orange Bikes on West End Boulevard.)

Rehabbing a vending machine is much like taking apart an old car, then cleaning and souping it up. “I really enjoy taking my time working on the machines, especially when they turn out the way I thought they would,” he says. “I was lucky enough to talk with a couple old-school vending guys before they retired.”

Two part-timers help Whittington fill orders and keep track of logistics with the artists. He deals with venues, fielding calls from shops and museums interested in hosting their own Art-o-mat. These calls, and artist inquiries, come to Whittington’s office by word-of-mouth and other means - he’s never had to market his project. “I get several hundred inquiries, and place maybe fifteen machines a year.”

He’s working on the tenth anniversary celebration for July. He’s held a few such celebrations in the parking lot of Mary’s Of Course, staying true to Art-o-mat’s roots. The artists love meeting each other and swapping their pieces.

Then, who knows. He’s thought of retrofitting an ice-cream truck to deliver art, “but it’s been done already.” He likes the idea of opening a storefront and gallery, but he hesitates to take on the financial risk. It’s the old oil-and-water problem, Whittington says, of creativity and commerce. Selling art in a gallery often means you start forcing the content, painting something so it matches someone’s living room. As an artist and a designer, he has learned skills that allow him to make a living, “but I still have a hard time with that balance. I don’t think art and money should mix.”

Except maybe in a souped-up vending machine.