The 1960s, Alloway reminisced, had been “a period of exceptional high pressure, affluence, creativity, [and] confidence.” In the 1970s the atmosphere was distinctly different: it may have been less spectacular and entertaining, and it was certainly more serious in tone, but “I don't think the scene is duller or weaker… rather there's a great deal of fairly diverse activity on a continuous plane.” Movements were less in evidence than individual options based not only on styles and genres, but also on ideologies, identity politics, technologies, environments, places, ideas, materials, or procedures. An indication of this changed outlook in art was the subtitle of Alan Sondheim's 1977 book on the contemporary avant-garde, Post-Movement Art in America. Sondheim suggested that the sensibility of the time was leading to “the world of the self” and so chose as the book's main title, Individuals. It may seem that Alloway would be sympathetic to Sondheim's argument, given that he had written in 1964 that an artist's work “embodies an order which is uniquely the concept of an individual artist…” But sympathy did not become full agreement because there are two crucial differences between the positions. The first is that they were written in different decades and in different contexts. Alloway's statement was written at a time when the idea of movements predominated. Movements often over-generalized and over-simplified common factors amongst a number of artists, and so could underestimate individual differences—a tendency that Alloway was keen to address when he wrote about, for example, artists associated with Pop. However, he also realized there was a great danger in dispensing with a way of dealing with commonality. More than once he pointed out that the danger of studying art as an unruly assembly of individuals is that each artist is removed from her or his context and becomes treated a-historically as uniquely creative, autonomous and free-floating—hence there is a need for “short-term art history.” The second crucial difference between the two writers’ apparently shared position is that, although Alloway's “conception of art as human evidence” seems to be echoed in Sondheim's emphasis on the self, what interested Alloway more than the individual artist was art as an overall system in which “plural choices co-exist.”