The claim that an avant-garde had moral authority and historical destiny seemed no longer tenable. A conceptual framework of pluralism, as Alloway was well aware, could not tolerate the claims of specialness, but treated Modernist aesthetics as an option: “avant-garde activities seem less heroic gestures than legitimate variables.” The phrase “legitimate variables” indicated Alloway's position: “variables” related to variety and pluralism; “legitimate” implied that the situation was not one of “anything goes,” but of considered positions that offered an art of engagement and depth. Alloway's pluralism was sometimes misunderstood. Reviewing the 1975 Topics in American Art, a collection of thirty-four of his articles published between 1961 and 1973, Cecile and David Shapiro came to the conclusion that Alloway is “sufficiently latitudinarian to allow anything that calls itself art to be considered as art.” They suggested that, if he “were to follow the logic of his permissiveness further, he would be obliged, one suspects, to review the annual exhibitions of, say, the Society of Illustrators, if not advertisements and illustrations themselves.” Would comic strip also be defined by him as art, they wondered. It would not have been inconceivable that Alloway write about such material, but he would have retained the distinction, formed in his Independent Group days, between art and other (equally valid) discourses, rather than conflating them all into art. Different discourses played different roles, had separate histories, and enjoyed distinctive relationships with their audiences in terms of the latter's assumptions and expectations. To be classed as art worthy of its name, the “human evidence” had to attain a certain degree of “density” as well as being open to “variable interpretation.” “Artworks, it seems to me,” he had explained, “have the capacity to move through time subject to this perpetual shifting interpretation and yet retain a certain kind of density… Art is sufficiently compact and sufficiently complex to support a great many interpretations.” This was not the case in other discourses: “The narrative structure of movies—the successive structure of movies in time—tends to restrict them to a much shorter period of time.