The problem remained, however, he argued in “The Artist Count,” that criticism “is failing completely to cope with the multiplicity of artists. The continual resort to simplificatory strategies amounts to a breakdown of adaptive thought. Despite the quantity of artists and of movements in New York there is implanted resistance to the acknowledgement of plenty.” It is rare for a critic to commit to plurality at a serious level: “Few critics write about both Process art and painting or about conceptual art and realism…” During the 1970s, he wrote at the end of the decade, it was in their “failure to allow for the productivity of the communication system that art critics’ performances have deteriorated. Critics tended to choose one part of the field and uphold it as the center, thus creating “scattered islands of privilege” which might then be taken up by the market. A critic's commitment to an artist, group, or type of art provided a sense of identity and purpose but, he had argued, the “points at which a critic is strict or ‘passionate’ are usually taken as the test of his or her caliber, but perhaps they are really the weak points, the place where the first person singular claims a false diachronic authority.” The more a critic promoted a particular type of art, the greater was the loss of the potential of a wider view: the “sense of the art world as a continuum of varied events… tends to recede as writers become more successful.”

A damaging underlying attitude was the assumption among American critics that there was some form of “social Darwinism” in art: “It is not that the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the ‘struggle for existence’ is specifically argued, but there is an underlying assumption of progress through evolution.” Evolutionary modes of criticism result in “an impoverished field of reference” and “reduce the function of criticism to the enforcement of short-term special interests.” This had been apparent even in feminism. For some feminist critics, the emphasis on the central void