What is there poetical about being in revolt?

You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It's mere vomiting.—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

In art, love of the law translates into two complimentary forms of piety: the piety of craft married to the piety of subject matter.

The piety of craft: because fundamental to craft is reverence for tradition. The modern devaluation of craft is a profanation.

Sacred time is circular. It is an incessant return to origins. Therefore, sacred art finds invention in the  retelling of the same stories, in the reverential recreation of the same forms. The modern striving for novelty is a profanation.

Praising the beautiful

is sufficient castigation of the ugly. 

Why so much energy

and invention in '60s music and so little in '60s art?

From the '60s onwards the nominal arts become of strictly academic interest.The contrast between the energy of the counterculture and the enervation of '60s institutionally sponsored art is striking. Just at the moment when things were heating up on streets, campuses, and music venues, things were cooling down in galleries.

The best thing that came out of modernism was so-called primitivism, but by the 1960s, primitivism in art was in abeyance. When it resurfaced in the '80s as Neo-expressionism, things weren't the same, probably because Neo-expressionism was the expressionism of artists who had learned about it in art school. Plus,  primitivism needed an ironic cover in order to be smuggled into institutional settings, so it came across as a simulacrum.

Fast forward to today and both art and music are equally boring.

 

I think of the counterculture

as something consumerism unintentionally produced. 

And then nullified.

The machinery of consumerism exists to incite dissatisfaction. Specifically, it is designed to create just enough dissatisfaction to make you crave the new thing but not so much that you become disillusioned with consumption altogether. 

In the '60s you had a generation that had grown up conditioned by this artificially induced appetite for something more, and I would say it was conditioned to the point where the appetite could not be satisfied by what consumerism had to offer. I would even say that at some point, consumerism produced a craving for the transcendent that threatened a complete generational rupture with the consumer economy. Hence the youthful indulgence in sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and esoteric non-Western spiritual practices. Young people were craving ecstatic experiences that exceeded, for a moment, what consumerism could bring to market.

Those moments of ecstasy and abandon were the beatific highlights of the counterculture.

But then the inevitable corruption set in, hastened by the internalization of that same consumerist conditioning that had incited a rebellion against consumerism. These '60s kids just couldn't kick the need for instant gratification. 

Glimpses of the transcendent are easy to come by. Music, drugs, sex offer glimpses. But to abide in the transcendent requires sacrifice, discipline, humility, and persistence, and the individuals capable of this were few. So it did not take very long for consumerism to reclaim the erstwhile rebels of the '60s.

Seeking the mystical death of the ego, many succumbed to actual self-destruction. The rest became consumers of "alternative" lifestyles dependent on alternative modes of consumption, which a consumer society was all too happy to accommodate, whether in the form of peasant blouses, beads, bell-bottoms or in the form of illicit but easily obtainable drugs.

The drugs were shortcuts to an altered state of consciousness that might have become mystical and genuinely life-changing had it been achieved with the proper techniques and proper attitude, that is, through prayer, self-discipline, and surrender to God's will. But the children of Madison Avenue did not have it in them to endure the hardships that spiritual purgation requires.

So instead of becoming ascetic mystics they became spoiled and whiny boomers.

But, yes, before the rot set in there were moments of great beauty in the '60s and most of them are to be found in the music.

Wisdom (Sophia)

lives in myth not philosophy.