Art remained to Alloway a constant category, however changeable its forms and media, and however much Post-Modernism was vaunted as a radical departure: “Despite the appeal of theories of breakthrough and obsolescence the containing concept remains that of art.” Any attempt to subvert art “does not allow for art's time-binding capacity, that density of content which builds up various levels of experience.” The idea of collapsing art's specialness into either socio-political critique or de-privileging it within a broader concept of visual representations held no appeal to him. Just what constituted art changed over time as Alloway happily responded to art's developments from the 1950s to the 1980s. The closest to a definitive definition was his statement that a work of art “represents a possibility; it is the permutation (even if no others are given) of an order.” His sense of order did not necessarily imply sophistication because “all human order, including that of the arts, is arbitrary. It follows that all systems and procedures adopted by artists are unlikely and improbable personal constructions and not, as was once believed, approximations of superior order, emblems of stability.” In Topics in American Art since 1945 Alloway reveals that “I derived the idea of arbitrary order, in part at least, from Norbert Wiener's formulation of order as an improbable form of structure rather than an inherent pattern. By viewing order as personal and arbitrary I felt free to appreciate the internal syntax of art without being restricted to a form of art for art's sake. I viewed formal play as the projection of a particular set of human decisions without the support of absolute beliefs.” The difference between mere human ordering and human ordering as art was to do with such qualities as “power,” “clarity,” “intensity,” and “invention” as well as its “nonutility” and lack of instrumental compromise—even though the form itself was essentially arbitrary.

One of the main reasons that Alloway so liked the art gallery was that it provided “a good way to view art: it is not too large, the art is concentrated, and there are not too many people as a rule. Marxist contentions about its exclusivity and irrelevance fail to do justice to the possibilities for sustained attention that it usually offers.” “One of the pleasures of an exhibition,” he declared, “is… the scrutiny of originals.”