Mural art, whether predominantly social or aesthetic, and Earth art, when added to realism, Photo-Realism, feminism, and even lay art, made for a diverse range of practices and values in the first half of the 1970s, and in 1977 Alloway returned to the issue of pluralism in “The Artist Count: In Praise of Plenty,” written for Art in America. The fundamental premises of inclusiveness and diversity remained intact. The art world may have seemed different in the 1970s, but this was partly because of the high profile succession of movements in the previous decade: “Now the atmosphere isn't producing that kind of thing. I don't think the scene is duller or weaker… rather there's a great deal of fairly diverse activity on a continuous plane. Instead of the competitive, spectacular, entertaining scene, it seems more like a scene containing a great deal of continuous, graduated, serious work.” What used to be seen as group activities, “are now clearly seen as personal decisions. Thus, the apparent parade of rapid movements is seen for what it is—a simultaneous field, not a succession.” Therefore, “Nothing less than a situational and contextual analysis of the events of the art world as a whole will suffice for the understanding of contemporary art.” The critic should perform a mapping process of values and practices and the “multiple components of the system can be provisionally evaluated by some such terms as these: latent, emerging, continuing, dominant, and declining. The scale can be applied to artists, groups, styles or institutions—everything, in fact, that makes up what is called the art world.” The notion of variable trajectories within an age is directly derived from George Kubler's The Shape of Time, first published in 1962. Max Kozloff had recommended the book to Alloway who acknowledged in 1973 that Kubler's book has “influenced me more than any other single source recently. His idea of arts and media characterized by ‘different systematic ages’, that is, different stages of development, when viewed in series, has made a difference to the way I see everything.” The “systematic age” of an object would take account of “its position in the duration,” and gave rise not only to terms such as latent, emerging, continuing, etc., but also required us to think of—a sub-heading in the conclusion—“the plural present.”