In 1979 Alloway was diagnosed as suffering from neurological and spinal diseases. At the age of fifty-two he underwent a thoracic laminectomy. A repeat operation was carried out eighteen months later. In 1981 two further operations were performed but with no success, and by the end of that year he was largely confined to a wheelchair. He wrote that “… I suffer from great fatigue, even after what would once have seemed short terms of activity.” He was having to come to terms with the implications of the loss of mobility: “I cannot visit exhibitions as I used to or artists’ studios, an essential source of information in the study of living art. Thus the range of subjects that I write about has been contracted by difficulty of access. I continue to write but on an occasional basis and a drastically reduced scale…” Not only did he have to resign his post at SUNY, he also had to give up his co-editorship of Art Criticism and his regular column in The Nation. His final Nation piece appeared on February 21, 1981. It was a critique of Robert Hughes's Shock of the New programmes on television which, Alloway thought, “represents a significant point in the popularization of art.” Although he welcomed popularization, he did have reservations about art on television because the screen's “illusive porous field is absolutely unlike the surfaces that artists paint and draw upon…” Alloway was no less critical about the relationship and wrote about “The Support System and the Art Market” for Art Monthly in 1982. Amidst further criticism of the commercialization of the market, the dubious connections between collectors, dealers, and curators, and the Marxist rejection of art as commodity, he declares a liberal-humanist sounding commitment to the “public store of culture” housed in museums. Even the avant-garde was justified in similar terms: “There's a tendency to celebrate the avant-garde only in terms of its newness. But frequently what the avant-garde is exercising is a ‘time-binding’ function, re-interpreting some traditional aspect of our culture rather than adding a new aspect.” What, for Alloway, remains constant about art is its value, richness, and diversity, qualities that are historical as well as contemporary. Topicality was only a valid criterion if it resulted in a depth engagement with current issues.