ack!

I hate it when I read something and feel like I just don't get it. I've always heard that Kathy Acker is just awesome, but she's one of those people whose name I always forget just as I get to the library. But, eventually, I managed to check out Blood and Guts in High School last week. And now, as I'm reading it, I feel like I'm just missing something. If I had been the first person to read this book, I don't know if I would have classified it as excellent or awful. I mean, not to diss Kathy Acker, because I'm sure she's awesome and I just haven't "gotten" it yet, but I have read some crappy crappy books before that in some ways remind me of this.
Can you recognize genius if it doesn't resemble anything you've encountered before? It's easy to classify something unfamiliar as crap. How many works of art, songs, books, poems, been disregarded that, in truth, contained something new and original that could have changed the course of art and literature as we know it? And on the converse, are there things that one person has decided are genius because they are different that are not as potentially world-shaking? Do you think that there are things that people have just decided are good, and everybody else just agrees with them because they don't want to look like they don't "get" it?