This study in human communications ranges widely over scholarly work by Barthes, Bateson, Dewey, Richards, Peckham, Burke, and especially McLuhan, as well as art works by Warhol, Joyce, and various vodeo tape and film makers. In surveying the developments in art and advertising, the author finds that the arts (1) are now a kind of laboratory for an experimental world (McLuhan's conception), (2) are engaged in a process of disturbing the existing order (Peckham), (3) are thus future directed, and (4) are, as sources of aesthetic theory, powerful guideposts for communication theorists and scholars (Burke). Thus a study of the world's arts, examined systematically as communication, will yield a recognition that the "futuristic symbolic language of the arts provides a proper . . . tool of comparison with the general communication system of the here and now." (CH)