In Alloway's Art International review praising the October to December 1961 American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists exhibition, he mentioned that the new vice-president for art administration of the Guggenheim, H.H. Arnason—whom he had met on his 1958 trip—had introduced a policy for the museum of showing contemporary, rather than recent and historical art. The origins of the museum in the 1930s were based on a puritanical commitment to transhistorical, non-objective painting of the 1920s and 1930s, and it was only in the 1950s, under the directorship of J.J. Sweeney, that the Guggenheim became more inclusive in its remit, albeit remaining resolutely Modernist. A new stage was reached at the beginning of the 1960s when Sweeney retired after the move to Frank Lloyd Wright's notorious building, and Arnason had the task of putting together a new team with a more up-to-date outlook. Alloway was almost certainly aware of this.

Although welcoming the development of showing contemporary art, Alloway pointed out in his Art International review that galleries and museums had different roles: galleries should take risks with artists at the beginnings of their careers, whereas museums could not but confer status, so it had to be merited. However, there was obviously a need for a “few more rungs in the ladder” between the solo show at a commercial gallery, and the retrospective at a museum. There was a danger that “the deserving young and attractive-but-premature debuts are promiscuously mingled,” and the Guggenheim's current show of Chryssa was an example of how it could be “inflationary to give new faces, like Chryssa's, museum-status quite so early. A museum, with its obligations to the future, should be on guard against the lure of too-great topicality.” What the museum could do effectively, Alloway continued, was to mount large or themed shows incorporating different artists. This should be the museum's “main influence” by making connections between artists “who are insulated in separate galleries, in comparing early and late works, and so on.”