Where Alloway and Greenberg were most apart was with new assemblage or “junk” art, neo-Dada, and the emerging Pop art. Greenberg admitted he was occasionally entertained by some of these works, “yet the effect is only momentary, since novelty, as distinct from originality, has no staying power.” This made for an art of low aspirations. For Alloway, writing over six months before the Museum of Modern Art's The Art of Assemblage exhibition (and while still in London), the use of junk by artists such as Arman, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, and John Latham was a “continuation of themes of general validity in the body of modern art as a whole” and stretched back to Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and even the Bauhaus. It was far more than a neo-Dada gesture. First, junk art is, fundamentally, an “urban art.” Rosenberg had argued in 1959 that Abstract Expressionism was America's great urban art but Alloway thought that its urbanism was “minor and doubtful.” Junk art, on the other hand, could only exist in an urban environment because its “source is obsolescence, the throw-away material of cities…” It contrasted with the 1920s when it was the pristine quality of objects, typified by the machine aesthetic of the Bauhaus, that represented metropolitan culture. Second, the objects “have a history” and are literally shaped by circumstances; they have resonances and are “frequently presented in terms that dramatize spread, flow, extension, trespass”—junk as a three-dimensional form of Information Theory. This meant, third, that “Proximity and participation replace distance and contemplation”—the theme of spectator participation is carried forward from the mass media and Place. Finally, junk is part of a “non-hierarchic” culture that potentially links all objects and images, like a Rauschenberg print or combine. The conservative art critic Hilton Kramer rejected junk because it was just junk, and so not able to be art. As Alloway pointed out, “this is to miss the fact that essential to junk culture is preservation of the original status and function of the objects in the new context of the work of art.” A crucial part of the process is “transformation.” Alloway's arguments, which draw on iconology, memory, association, society and sociology, show the narrowness of Greenberg's emphasis which focused on only formal outcomes.