In her attack on pluralism in Has Modernism Failed?, Suzi Gablik describes a condition in which “Everything can now be accommodated.” She regrets the loss of “what is acceptable as art and what is unacceptable…” Although this applies to “weak” pluralism, it does not apply to “strong” pluralism in which all options could only potentially be accommodated, and would have to be critically argued as “legitimate variables.” However, the legacy of Alloway's “strong” pluralism has not been impressive, whereas Gablik's warnings about an entropic-like decline into “anything goes” might describe the current situation better and returns us to Alloway's view that “A criterion of diversity, cued by the production of art as a whole, is not the same as tolerance or goodwill on a basis of indifference.” Benjamin H.D. Buchloh recently bemoaned contemporary pluralism: “One response to [the] new historical conditions governing the art world… has been to embrace the principle of a totally noncommitted pluralism. It is not even clear whether that principle originated in political conviction or whether this default position simply resulted from both indifference and de-differentiation (of criteria, of judgment, of a commitment to history or anything whatsoever).” This “noncommitted” or “weak” pluralism “makes it painfully evident how difficult a task it must be to judge without discerning, to discern without criteria, to love art without a larger comprehension of cultural practice— to name but a few of the inevitable contradictions of the liberal-pluralist model.”

The sociologist Gregor McLennan in his book on Pluralism would seem to agree with Buchloh. In the 1970s, he recalls, from the point of view of structuralist and neo-Marxist norms, it was often thought that to be a pluralist in the academic disciplines of sociology and politics generally meant

1. •Being concerned with superficial, contingment behaviour rather than persuasive and enduring social structures;

2. •Being “melody” descriptive rather than rigorously theoretical in style and ambition;

3. •Lacking a coherent organizing “paradigm” to guide one's academic work.

An uncharitable account of Alloway's criticism could map McLennan's three characteristics on to art as evidence with its individual practices; the “descriptive” aesthetic; and the absence of an intellectually respectable paradigm such as Marxism or Post-Modernism. Thus Alloway would be a pluralist of his time.