This author contends that it is sometimes difficult to construe exactly what the visual culture movement really involves. To use the kind of lingo that its spokespersons favor, we are seeing a conflict between transfigured factions surviving from the 1960s. During that fevered era, it appeared to academic liberals that America was becoming fragmented into three distinct categories--conservative, liberal, and the countercultural youth movement. That was, however, a misconception. For the youth movement itself was divided by a fault line that placed the New Left on one side and the so-called "hippies" on the other. Today, it is difficult to speak of the comprehensive aspects of our society without touching on popular art. Interactions between such things as commercial illustration and serious painting are no longer of mere historical or comparative interest.