The blending of “high” and “low,” and the temptation of aesthetic relativism that comes with it, has been with us at least since the beginning of the twentieth century—when Henri Rousseau was acclaimed a genius for his ostentatiously naive paintings and the Surrealists found unexpected inspiration in the careless, breathless style of the Fantômas novels. Cave art and African masks, made by people then presumed to be “primitive” in some inescapable sense, made Pablo Picasso and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska who they were. It never went away in literary studies, where first, the author’s intention, and then, just the author, were declared off-limits to criticism. The films and paintings of Andy Warhol, the music of Sun Ra and John Cage and Brian Eno and then of the more committedly amateur post-punk artists, and the creative plagiarism of hip-hop DJs and writers like Kathy Acker all raised the question: Is it still art if you don’t know or control what you’re doing? Knowledge of tradition didn’t necessarily matter; training didn’t necessarily matter; meaning didn’t necessarily matter; vision didn’t necessarily matter. This process of aesthetic reassessment resembled the way Christian theology every so often rediscovers the frankly antinomian possibilities of a salvation initiated and completed by God. If our hard work doesn’t matter, why bother?