The 1960s are often remembered as a time of optimism, and an optimistic tone certainly underlies most of Alloway's criticism. He explained that partly by stating that “When I came to America, it seemed to me I was surrounded by enough negative criticism, so I tended not to write about people I didn't like.” More important, though, was the art world itself: “The 1960s was a period of exceptional high pressure, affluence, creativity, confidence, and you had a terrific succession of movements.” However, his espousal of “stylistic abundance” in art in the 1960s could be seen as the equivalent to the “material abundance” of the consumer society. Certainly the link between art and society was explicit: “An aesthetic of plenty with its multiplicity of styles and consumer-mobility is appropriate to a non-Depression-based culture.” Perhaps Dore Ashton's accusation that Alloway was little more than a marketing man helping to sell the latest fashion in art by carefully branding it was, ironically, systemically true. Abundance chararacterized the 1960s’ art world. In the words of the artist Paul Brach in 1967: “There are more artists, more collectors, more dealers, more critics, more money, more action!” Pluralism could just be the intellectual rationalization of consumer society's excess.

A reaction against the materialism of the consumer society, especially amongst the young, aligned with political disillusionment, and opposition to the Vietnam war and police over-reaction to protest, led to the growth of movements such as civil rights, anti-war, Black Power, and the beginnings of the women's movement, and this was to have an impact on Alloway's criticism and his thoughts about pluralism in the 1970s. There was a very different mood in the last years of the decade. According to Kim Levin:

In 1967 Donald Judd responded to a question about the sensibility of the 1960s by commenting that “The same fat surplus which burns in Vietnam feeds us. Let the art armies be disbanded.”