As we have seen, Alloway was highly receptive to the developments in avant-garde art in the late 1960s. It is crucial, though, if we are to understand Alloway's values fully as well as examining his critical legacy, to realize that newness was not an end in itself, but a means of increasing options. As he once put it, “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.” This was a point that came out of his catalogue essay on “Abstract Painting” for the For Concept exhibition at Vassar College Art Gallery in the spring of 1969. Alloway was reassessing “the object-status of conceptual abstract painting” in the light of the move away from painting to, in the case of Minimalism, objects and, with Conceptualism, documents. Compared to conceptual art, abstract painting remained in Walter Benjamin's domain of tradition—“for instance, manual control may not be necessary, but scale, as experienced in the presence of originals only, is essential to the new art.” Painting could also be defined as a class of object:

Alloway is providing a workable conceptual as well as an historical model of painting. This was in opposition to a number of artists and critics at the time who saw painting as an historical discipline that carried with it the baggage of the past.