This article draws attention to three important aesthetic ideas--ideas which have become, in the early twenty-first century, so widely endorsed in Western culture that they have become the stock platform of much theorizing and teaching about our experience of art and its relation to the rest of life. All of these ideas sprang from Beat thought in the 1960s, and have subsequently become fundamental elements in visual culture theory. In examining these aesthetic ideas, the article discusses both their assets--the strengths that make them so appealing to visual culture theory--and their liabilities--the potential seeds of destruction about which one should be wary. This article concludes, in the long run, whether or not visual culture will have a longer career than the Beat movement will depend on what road it takes and who is waiting down that road to pick up where it leaves off. (Contains 31 endnotes.)