Contemporary writers and other artists with a style that is intricate, hermetic, demanding--not to speak to "beautiful"--get their ration of unstinting praise.

any particular morality has its dross, those elements which are no more than a defense of limited social interests and class values

For morality, unlike art, is ultimately justified by its utility: that it makes, or is supposed to make, life more humane and livable for us all. But consciousness--what used to be called, rather tendentiously, the faculty of contemplation--can be, and is, wider and more various than action. It has its nourishment, art and speculative thought, activities which can be described either as self-justifying or in no need of justification. What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize. This act of comprehension accompanied by voluptuousness is the only valid end, and sole sufficient justification, of a work of art.

consciousness--what used to be called, rather tendentiously, the faculty of contemplation

All of which harkens back to Nietzsche's famous statement in The Birth of Tragedy: "Art is not an imitation of nature but its metaphysical supplement, raised up beside it in order to overcome it."

[...] Usually critics who want to praise a work of art feel compelled to demonstrate that each part is justified, that it could not be other than it is. And every artist, when it comes to his own work, remembering the role of chance, fatigue, external distractions, knows what the critic says to be a lie, knows that it could well have been otherwise. The sense of inevitability that a great work of art projects is not made up of the inevitability or necessity of its parts, but of the whole.