“By the end of the 1970s,” Corinne Robins points out in The Pluralist Era, “terms such as ‘Post-Modernism’ and ‘Pluralism’ were being used interchangeably.” Leo Steimberg and Gregory Battcock had used the former term as early as 1972 and 1973 repectively: Steinberg in his “Other Criteria” essay of 1972 to refer to Rauschenberg's new pictorial organization; and Battcock in his book about conceptual art, Idea Art, in which he equates “post-Modernist art” with Pop, Minimal, and conceptual. The sub-title of Calvin Tomkins's The Scene of 1976 was Reports on Post-Modern Art, but the collection of his journalistic essays from The New Yorker does not develop the term further. A year later a collection of Douglas Davie's lectures and essays was published under the title Artculture: Essays on the Post-Modern, but the entry for “Post-Modernist art” in the index refers the reader to “Post-Minimal art.” Robins cites Charles Jencks's The Language of Post-Modern Architecture in 1977 as the first rigorous use of the term. Jencks was proposing a new theory of architecture that eschewed Modernist abstraction and the less-ismore aesthetic, and emphasized communication and expression through ornamentation, decoration, graphics, and illustrative form. Interestingly, Jencks intended an “implied pluralism” within Post-Modernism because he did not want a singular version of the new approach: “I prefer,” he wrote, “that it is pluralistic.” By the turn of the decade the term was being regularly used—even Clement Greenberg wrote a piece on “Modern and Post-Modern” in 1980—but it was largely interchangeable with pluralist, post-Minimal, or post-movement art. Overwhelmingly, at this stage, Post-Modernist (whether or not hyphenated or capitalized) art was art that was not Modernist.

Alloway's first engagement with the term was in a review of Tomkins's The Scene in December 1976. He was dismissive: “He takes a dubious Daniel Bell-ism, ‘post-modern,’ as a general idea, but it is just a bluff.” The reference is to The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Bell's 1973 book in which the author outlines the shift from an economy of manufacture to one of service, with ensuing greater mass consumption and leisure. This was exactly the sort of shift that the Independent Group had predicted and eagerly anticipated.