Halley put forth such ideas on modernism, postmodernism, culture, and the digital revolution—derived in part from Foucault, Baudrillard, and others, and with a neo-Marxist slant—in his numerous writings. He published his first essay "Beat, Minimalism, New Wave, and Robert Smithson" in 1981 in "Arts Magazine", a New York-based publication that published seven more of his essays throughout that decade. In his essays, published from the 1980s to early 2000s, Halley makes reference to the shifting relationship between the individual and larger social structures, and how artists of his generation responded to the emerging social, economic, and cultural conditions of the 1980s and 1990s. Halley highlighted the various roles of New Wave music, Cold War cultural politics, and the increased digitization of experience brought about by computers and video games. Additionally, he provided a critical overview of contemporary art during this period through examining a range of sources including the social theories of José Ortega y Gasset, Norbert Elias, and Richard Sennett.