At the beginning of the decade, what to some like Alloway appeared as aesthetic changes, were interpreted by others as political statements. For example, Kynaston McShine's Information exhibition at MoMA had been intended to show the impact on art of a “culture that has been considerably altered by communications systems.” By the time it opened in July, the context had been changed by political events and the catalogue included a reproduction of the Art Workers’ Coalition's And Babies poster, endpapers with photographs of an anti-war march, and a collection of uncaptioned illustrations that mixed together art and politics. In his introduction, McShine referred to the artists’ “spirited if not rebellious” contributions which had been partly shaped by

Lippard had believed that the type of work in Information would subvert the normal assumptions of the art market: “since dealers cannot sell art-as-idea, economic materialism is denied along with physical materialism.” Reflecting on the radicalism of conceptual art, she stated that “It seemed… that no one, not even a public greedy for novelty, would actually pay money, or much of it, for a xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of photographs documenting an ephemeral situation or condition, a project for work never to be completed, words spoken but not recorded; it seemed that these artists would therefore be forcibly freed from the tyranny of a commodity status and market-orientation.” Instead, the artist could create “visionary and utopian art” or some form of interventionist and oppositional work that confronted aspects of, if not capitalism, then at least the complacent and compliant society that had transmogrified the American dream in terms of international aggression and personal affluence. Disorienting art was appropriate for the dissenting society that had been growing in the later years of the 1960s.