beauty (pt. 2)

"One of the good effects of artistic beauty is that by being essentially nonutilitarian it draws a boundary  around the compulsion to make money. It clears a ground in which people can recover and celebrate human values for their own sake. It thus serves as an invaluable antidote to the materialism and acquisitiveness that are always threatening to overwhelm the human race and are especially prominent in our own technological society." -Leland Ryken, The Liberated Imagination