Architecture and music are worth comparing for one very
important reason, which is that, while the second is a fine art, and one that
entirely draws on its own resources for its own spiritual ends, the first is a
skill, which is measured partly in terms of its utility, and which cannot in
the nature of things demand genius or originality from its ordinary
practitioner. This distinction has been acknowledged at least since the birth
of philosophical aesthetics in the eighteenth century, and it is of increasing
importance to us, in an age when critics and impresarios count "originality," "creativity," "transgression," and "challenge" as the primary aesthetic values,
and dismiss the love of beauty as a lingering form of nostalgia.
Roger Scruton
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