society. Genteel art is a kind of repeat of the specialized 
acrobatic feats of an industrialized world. Popular art is the 
clown reminding us of all the life and faculty that we have 
omitted from our daily routines. He ventures to perform the 
specialized routines of the society, acting as integral man. But 
integral man is quite inept in a specialist situation. This, at 
least, is one way to get at the art of the comics, and the art of 
the clown.

     Today our ten-year-olds, in voting for MAD , are telling us 
in their own way that the TV image has ended the consumer 
phase of American culture. They are now telling us what the 
eighteen-year-old beatniks were first trying to say ten years 
ago. The pictorial consumer age is dead. The iconic age is upon 
us. We now toss to the Europeans the package that concerned 
us from 1922 to 1952. They, in turn, enter their first consumer