Alloway made use of his column in The Nation to demonstrate the broader values he was defining. He had clearly distinguished between art criticism and art reviewing in 1967. Art criticism did not rule out reviewing exhibitions so long as the response to the particular artist or exhibition led to a wider discussion. The advantage of a publication like The Nation was that it provided a context of intelligent, informed discussion and progressive opinion. Furthermore, the regularity of his column—usually once a fortnight in the weekly publication—provided the opportunity of being topical, and writing about exhibitions while they were still current, or issues that were live. It provided the opportunity for “short-term” art history that was “provisional, it's improvised, but [is] objective as far as the information allows at the moment.”

Alloway wrote over fifty pieces for The Nation between 1968 and 1970 and we can examine two articles that deal with key exhibitions in order to gauge his hold on art history in the making. In the summer of 1969 the Whitney Museum staged Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, an exhibition with works that were “loose-jointed, powdered, crinkled, random, untethered, thrown, or piled…” Exhibits included “a single rock (William Bollinger), wall-to-wall modular units (Carl Andre), smeared grease and heaped hay (Rafael Ferrer), splattered lead (Richard Serra), or flour dust (Barry Le Va).” Eva Hesse's “constructions of fiberglass, rubberized cheesecloth, cloth, wire, and window screen, in various combinations” were one of the highlights, and Alloway responded positively to works by Keith Sonnier, Robert Morris, and Robert Ryman. The only disappointment was Bruce Nauman's Performance Corridor because it was “pretty routine compared to his usual level of invention.” But he did have a serious criticism of the claim in the catalogue by Marcia Tucker that the new art makes “chaos its structure.” Alloway's criticism was a chiding of Tucker's claim: “chaos is no more absolute than beauty. The art in the Anti-Illusion show is characterized by a relaxation of the threshold between the inside and the outside of the work of art, but this is not essentially chaotic. It is learnable and enjoyable.” Here is art as a permutation of human order, however conventionally unordered.