It is difficult to evoke, now, the impact Hilton Kramer’s powerful essay “The Age of the Avant-Garde” had on me when Commentary first published it in 1972. Few essays of that time broke through the prevailing current of countercultural intoxication, and for a college student who had been swept up by waves of promised Nietzschean transformation, the sober signs of a counter-reformation reflected in Hilton’s analysis were bracing.

The only other essay I recall having a similar impact (at least on my nascent consciousness) also appeared in Commentary in 1971: “The Holiness of Sin,” by the magisterial historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem. That essay dealt with the transformations set in motion by the sixteenth-century false Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, whose followers, in order to reconcile his perverse and bizarre acts with their own grandiose theories and expectations of salvation, imagined that violation itself was redemptive, that the way to holiness was through sin.

Both these essays dealt with rebellion and its consequences, issues that still resonate: When do aesthetic and social rebellions succeed and when do they fail? When do they end up reviving a tradition and when do they end up overturning it? When is revolution to be welcomed and when does it become antinomian? And what happens when rebellion becomes tradition itself?

A little less than a decade after reading Hilton’s essay, I finally met him. A friend we had in common suggested I speak with him about The New York Times, which