If Kozloff's essay, as mentioned above, underlined how “appreciative criticism [had]… become routine and banal,” then how should criticism be revived? The question revealed a crisis. Kozloff recounted writing a paper about art criticism and art education in 1970 at the time of the beginning of the Cambodian invasion. It was not, as he put it, that the subjects of the conference were “ignoble but their present socio-political context would taint with them the onus of a classy tipping for investors, a form of exalted PR work for a superannuated establishment.” Barbara Rose, at the same conference, talked about “the beginning of the liquidation of art criticism” because “There is no way to avoid the consequence that making judgements in print results in market manipulation.” The options for the alienated critic, she thought, included: reporting “neutrally and inclusively” for the mass media, and thus communicating with a non-specialist audience; entering academia; studying art criticism as a discipline; becoming an artist; and developing a sociological critique about the relationship of culture and society. In 1973, Alloway came up with his own formulation of the issue in the last of three lectures given at the Art Students’ League in New York. “What,” he asked, “to put in the place of stylistic criticism and its assumptions, sometimes explicit, but always assumed, of the objective existence of norms of quality? How to advance the recognition of the art of newly enfranchised social groups, which is part of the pressure of postclassical abundance?”

Alloway looked at critics’ responses during the 1970–1973 period. Kozloff had resolutely followed the sociological option; Rose first moved into print mass media, and then film. Lippard had admitted that she was “supporting a system I abhor by writing criticism;” Alloway detected “a loss of confidence”6 in her writing following her disappointment that “the dematerialization of the art object” did not produce the hoped-for alternative to the art market. He points out Kozloff (born 1933), Rose (1938) and Lippard (1937) were all of an age and were experiencing their first major social disillusionment. Harold Rosenberg (1906) and Greenberg (1909), although both ex-Marxists, belonged to a generation shaped by the Second World War, but their former politics did not equip them for the new radicalism.