Similarly, as part of the continuum, criticism of Pop carried on during and after it was a live art. In Architectural Design at the time of Six Painters and the Object he was describing a typical Pop work as being a “sign of a sign” and a “play with levels of signification,” revealing how a knowledge of semiotics extended his understanding of Information Theory. 1964 and 1965 were the apex of Pop art in terms of exhibitions, with solo shows for Oldenburg, Warhol, Ruscha, Rosenquist, Ramos, and Lichtenstein. British artists made an impact in the USA, and exhibitions were granted to Hockney, Allen Jones, Paolozzi, Kitaj, and Phillips. Asked what he thought of Pop art by an Italian magazine in mid-1964, Alloway replied, with Warholian ambiguity, that “I think it is fashionable, the art of our time (along with every other movement).” He also cast a doubt over its continuing validity, remarking that the Pop on display at the New York World's Fair demonstrates that “it can fall flat on its face.”

Alloway wrote very little on Pop or individual Pop artists in 1964 and 1965, reflecting the fact that he felt more interesting developments were happening in other areas of art. By 1966 Pop was being historicized and his essay on “The Development of British Pop” appeared in Lucy Lippard's Pop Art. But what he did find interesting regarding Pop was a phenomenon occurring around that time. As he put it in Arts Magazine in 1967, the term Pop art “began as a comprehensive term designed to admit the mass media into the narrowly defined field of the fine arts. Then the term shrank to refer to the art produced by artists quoting the mass media or mass-produced sources. In the last two years it has opened out again and there is perpetual feedback between Pop art and mass culture.” Alloway noted that the term now applied to “fashion, films, interior decoration, toys, parties, and town-planning.” The new television series of Batman, for example, was consciously influenced by Pop art, referred to by its art director, Bob Kane, as “Pop art Camp.” As he expressed the same phenomenon in 1969, what was happening was a new example of “Cross-media exchanges and the convergence of multiple channels…”