Alloway's first response to the new mood of political unrest appeared in his Venice Biennale book in 1968. At this time, he thought the Biennale was “pointlessly interrupted”: he disagreed with the protestors’ manifesto claims, and tartly complained that “middle-class students have learned the pessimism long known to the poor and underprivileged.” He described as “decidedly archaic” the International Socialist rhetoric of the students at Venice attacking the Biennale as a symbol of the “culture of the bosses,” and condemned the “simplistic drama of the manifesto” arguing that, within the context of the distribution system, the Biennale and similar events, “take art out of an elite context,” and were, therefore, relatively democratic. That applied, it seems, whatever the larger political context—he wrote equally positively about the Biennale of contemporary Latin American art in Colombia in 1970, viewing it in terms of spreading information about art. When, earlier that year, American artists withdrew their work from the Sao Paulo Biennial because of the political situation in Brazil, Alloway wrote that it was “ludicrous to punish dictatorships by depriving them of modern art. All that happens is that the input of outside information, already reduced, is decreased still further… The only people to regret the absence of foreign art would be the nationals who are also intellectuals…” It was in places like Brazil, he felt, that events like the Biennial were most valid as part of the distribution system.

Alloway's interest in cultural institutions and organizations, whether the Biennale, museum, or gallery, was in its function as a “distribution agency” which was part of the “knowledge industry” at a time when we were witnessing a “communications explosion.”7 His use of quasi- Communications Theory around 1968 to 1970, rather than political critique, marks Alloway as largely a-political at this juncture, speaking the language of a technocratic society.