Alloway wanted to avoid an evolutionary account of art. One of the main things wrong with “Modernism” and “Post-Modernism” is that the terms “assume an evolutionary view of history, in which movements and generations displace one another relentlessly: Post-Modernism succeeds Modernism as competitively as a parade of Modern movements followed one another.” A non-evolutionary art history was not only necessary for a perspective on art, but it could also help critics to focus: “Art history is the model that has led critics toward specific topics or more closely defined problems.” The work of Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris provided a standard for him: “Both writers are feminists and they see their political position as fully compatible with the procedures of systematic study… It is not that art history is a zealous revisionary discipline: far from it; but it can be used that way.” There was no pretence that art history was value-free, but it needed to be explicit about its agenda, and rigorous in its methods. It also had to be open-minded and not driven by a priori assumptions about value. This is why Alloway was unsympathetic to an art history framed by an ideology that was exclusivist, whether the particular exclusivity was Marxist, Formalist, psychoanalytical or feminist: all too often, the ideas of Freud and Marx are “used as a source of unifying formulae, those slogans by which the world is reduced in size and one receives, free, the illusion of commanding vast fields of data.” Anthropology provided a more promising model because it embedded art in life, provided a more descriptive account of culture, and “offered a formulation about art as more than a treasury of precious items.” However, if taken as an exclusive system, the danger would be that “it would be devoted to the uncovering of hidden order, secret universals, with kinship patterns taking the place of Oedipus complex.” Alloway was suspicious of any grand scheme or meta-narrative because “Everything that can be made to fit a unifying formula appears to support it, but its main achievement is in reducing complexity to a scale of comfort.” He was attracted to the sort of multi-, inter-, and cross-disciplinary approach that the Independent Group had established in the early to mid-1950s.