One of the reasons for change was the controversy caused by the cancellation of the Hans Haacke exhibition at the Guggenheim. The photographs and documents assembled by the artist contained no evaluative commentary, but recorded the ownership of slum properties and commercial outlets. According to Alloway, Thomas Messer, the Guggenheim's Director, described Haacke's exhibit as “…‘a muckraking venture under the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’ and told Haacke so.” The artist agreed to compromise to the extent that he would give fictitious names to the landlords, but Messer rejected the offer on the grounds that “he wanted to protect the ‘aesthetic and educational status’ of the museum” and, secondly, he feared a libel action. To test the second, Artforum and Arts Magazine printed some of the documents and all of the names, but no libel action resulted. In a guest editorial of Arts, Messer argued that he had to make a point about the misuse of the Guggenheim for other ends: if he allowed Haacke's exhibit, then “what is there to prevent an artist-sponsored murder and subsequent insistence upon the irrelevance of ordinary justice?” Alloway scoffed at this “daft extrapolation.” The art-political climate in 1971 was hardly to Messer's advantage and a roster of 102 artists followed Messer's editorial stating that they were “refusing to allow our works to be exhibited in the Guggenheim until the policy of art censorship and its advocates have changed.” “It is against this background that Messer has decided that the Guggenheim is a citadel to be defended,” wrote Alloway. “He has forgotten or discounted the existence of a fairly widespread distrust of museums among artists and revolutionary students…” Messer may have dealt with a difficult situation badly, but Alloway's reaction to the Harlem on My Mind controversy in 1969, when he asserted the importance of a Director controlling what was exhibited in his museum, would lead one to suppose that he (Alloway) would uphold the same, presumably enduring, principle now. However, the criticism is all at Messer's door: “He chose merely to assert the rank of the museum rather than to demonstrate its versatility. His failure makes it harder for all of us seriously interested in working out the future role of museums in a society that is radically different from the one in which they were founded.”