There is no possible questioning of Alloway's commitment to what was to become known as Pop art. The mass media were influential on the younger generation of artists who began to emerge in 1957 but, Alloway pointed out at the time of Place, “not at the level of iconography and story, but at a level of spatial experience”—the visual immersion typified by “CinemaScope aesthetics.” Robyn Denny, for example, acknowledged that “For me the consumption of Pop art, and participation in the mass media, isn't in the nature of a symbol hunt…,” but is closer to a spatial experience. Richard Smith, a regular visitor to ICA exhibitions in the latter part of the 1950s and impressed by Situation, had been coming to terms with the nature of art in the mass media age. Marshall McLuhan's Mechanical Bride (1951) was a particular stimulus in the way that it made Smith aware that we lived amidst images of images. Nature, for example, was no longer directly experienced by most urban dwellers, but was mediated by the media with, in Barbara Rose's words, “the soft-focus blur of green in ads for mentholated cigarettes metaphorically equating cool tobacco with the freshness of a spring landscape.” In 1959 Smith, who had left for the USA, had stated that “Current technology, gossip column hearts and flowers, Eastman-color features, have no direct pin-pointable relation to my work of the moment, but they are not alien worlds.” Painting titles such as McCalls (1960), Chase Manhattan (1961), Revlon (1961), and Billboard (1961)—all included in his first solo show in New York in 1961—reveal Smith's main sources of adverts and commercial photography and which linked abstract painting, according to Alloway, “not to the absolute… not even to the rational economy of industrial production… but to the sensuous world of leisure.” At their London show in February 1960, the Scroope Group were more explicit than Smith about their sources and included mass media material— pin-ups and adverts—literally alongside their abstract paintings that had titles including Mingus, Oh!, Carol, and Sabrejet. “The tie-up of artists and Pop art,” commented Alloway, “is an index of urbanity… Today's artist receives and accepts the media's messages and spectacles.”