"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.