As an option, Alloway mused, realism “just presents me, with more complex experiences than most conceptual art does.” It was not just conceptual art that realism was displacing, but Modernist art in general in the early 1970s, contributing to the “corrosion of the concept of an avant-garde.” There were two reasons for this: the greater pluralism that realism opened up; and the decline of late Modernist art as an avant-garde. At the 1972 Venice Biennale, “Much of the work by younger artists derived from recent international painting and sculpture styles is exhausted and repetitive,” wrote Alloway and, as such, it was typical of a large part of recent Modernism. Under the influence of the writings of Greenberg—even though “he has published nothing of consequence for ten years”—and followers like Michael Fried and Kenworth Moffett, “the term Modernism has shrunk to refer to a kind of abstract painting dependent on colour and without drawing or tonal shadow.” The “current weakness of abstract painting” was typified by Kenneth Noland's painting. What he objected to was Noland's complacent adoption of formal rules concerning flatness and colour without drawing: “Thus the new paintings of Noland are not visual discoveries, but permutations of an easy idea about painting.” They may illustrate a Modernist idea about progression and essence but, in the paintings themselves, the “feeble prettiness of the washes and weightless stripes achieves only a vacant lyricism.” The problem was not with painting as a discipline, but with a certain kind of painting and the claims of specialness, priority and destiny that had been made for it. Modernist painting had become a parody because of its sense of self-importance: