One fascinating image in the exhibition is the opening scene from “Don’t Look Back,” D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, in which a self-consciously bored-looking Bob Dylan flips cue cards that mangle the lyrics of his “Subterranean Homesick Blues” while Ginsberg, looking vaguely rabbinical, chats away with someone else in the background. Another is a double photograph by Ginsberg showing Neal Cassady, Kerouac’s onetime road buddy and Ginsberg’s sometime lover, and Timothy Leary on the Merry Pranksters’ Day-Glo-painted bus, which Cassady had just driven cross-country. And then there’s a blowup of a 1957 photo of Ginsberg at the Beat Hotel, a small portrait of the 19th-century Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud hanging on the wall behind him, and behind that a poster for a show of paintings by Cézanne.

Images like these chart a free-floating concatenation of ideas and associations. Rimbaud was a formative influence, as he would be on later poets and performers like Patti Smith. The fractured perspectives of Cézanne’s landscapes inspired not only the Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque but also the unexpected jolts that characterize Ginsberg’s poetry. Cassady formed a direct link between the Beats and the hippie drug culture that Leary inspired. Years after his cameo in “Don’t Look Back,” Ginsberg would accompany Dylan on a visit to Kerouac’s grave.

Early on in the show, visitors encounter a room devoted to analog communications devices from past decades: Burroughs’s Underwood typewriter, a manual model with the profile of an upright piano. Old microphones and radios. Reel-to-reel tape recorders and portable record players. More than anything else in the exhibition, this equipment speaks of a different time. “It’s really finished,” Mr. Michaud said of the era the Beats inhabited. “We are not in an analog culture but in a digital culture. And no one really travels any more.” Instead we fly from Point A to Point B, with nothing in between. The Beats operated at a certain tempo, as the name implies. Digital is instantaneous.

It’s easy to conclude that Beat culture, like other countercultures that followed, has been co-opted by a mercenary society — easy and a bit facile. Yes, the former Beat Hotel is now a four-star establishment, its walls swaddled in toile de Jouy, its bathrooms tricked out with luxury toiletries and toilets that have seats. Poets and junkies can no more afford the Left Bank these days than they can afford Greenwich Village. And CBGB, the Bowery dive where Patti Smith once chanted “Go Rimbaud! Go Rimbaud! Go Rimbaud!”, is now a John Varvatos boutique. But that’s not the point.

The point is to be found in Burroughs’s typewriter and Ginsberg’s photographs — artful black-and-white images inscribed with who and where and why. “He was always transmitting,” Mr. Lebel said of Ginsberg. “That’s why we’re doing this show — to continue the transmission.” He admits to disappointment that no American museum has agreed to take it on, even though the New York Public Library and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other institutions, lent works and Rani Singh of the Getty Research Institute was an associate curator. (The exhibition is traveling to the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2017.) But he’s gratified to see people in their 20s clustered around the television screen in the exhibition’s reading room, watching a four-hour edit of a series of interviews he conducted with Ginsberg in Paris in 1990.

“I use the term ‘rhizome,’” Mr. Lebel said, referring to the spreading stem systems of plants like ginger and bamboo — a term applied to the transmission of ideas by the post-structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari. “It’s the contrary of roots. Once your roots dig in, you’re trapped — you can’t move. But artistic and philosophical movements work as rhizomes do — they’re continually spreading across time and space. That’s what I tried to do in the show, and in life.”