Alloway's fundamental premise, stated not for the first time, was that we had undergone a “shift from an aesthetic of shortage to one of abundance,” and that abundance was more apparent because it was experienced in the “expanded and accelerating communications network to which we are all plugged in.” The problem was that we had not, conceptually, fully adapted to the new condition. Rather than selecting one particular type of art as valid, and condemning the rest, we ought to cherish diversity:

He accepted that it is easier to adopt a particular form of art as better than another, because this reduces complexity and the need for multiple value systems: “There are certain difficulties about maintaining diversity as an ideal because, traditionally, art and artists have been subjected to very strong hierarchic ordering.” But the mental expectation that there would be hierarchy needed to change: “the notion of a hierarchy in the arts becomes expendable”—hierarchy was the latest convention that should become expendable. What would replace it was an upholding of the “divergent possibilities within the continuum of art…” The possibilities should remain open, and not be closed down when a claim for universal relevance or historical significance was made for one of the particular possibilities. Diversity was important for three, interrelated, reasons: first, it was a “global fact;” second, a commitment to “divergent possibilities” should also foster an attitude of “generosity and curiosity,” notably absent when criticism operated on “restriction and exclusion.” Most importantly, though, was that “art can be regarded as an area of the greatest freedom, in which plural choices co-exist.” The “pluralistic and multiple nature of modern art”8 was an expression of freedom: both of art itself, and creativity in general at its least constrained.