There's a first. The paragraph which I think may be somewhat wrong is the second of these two that follow. "Murray" is Charles Murray, and the offending excerpt is from this review essay

Murray is right to stress the importance of meaning it – of commitment in the arts. He tells of the stonemasons who sculpted gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals. They worked with passionate devotion, even when their handiwork would be invisible from the ground: God would see it. I discovered a similar aesthetic psychology in my own fieldwork in New Guinea, where serious artists view a carving created for a dead ancestor differently from one knocked off for tourists. Much of our own art and entertainment is shallow and flashy, made neither for God nor ancestors, but for a market.

But, accepting this does not mean that transcendental values form a principle necessary to explain high achievement in the arts. Consider the history of music. Murray makes it clear that the invention of polyphony led to more complex structures that, along with improved instrumentation, continued through the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. The Himalayan heights of music were reached 150 years later, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. If there is progress in this period, it is the progress of artists who responded to the problems and potentialities inherent in musical tonality. New instruments, developing popular audiences, a sense of formal experimentation, and above all the maturing of tonality were the driving forces for the great flowering of music through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was, in other words, the birth, flourishing, and exhaustion of organizing structures, not transcendental values, that provided the most important motor for music development.

I think, on the other hand, that the nineteenth century was positively pulsating with transcendental values, and that it was these very values which ran out of steam during the early part of the twentieth century. It wasn't that the possibilities of tonality had been exhausted. It was that the composers were no longer as interested in pursuing those possibilities. Tonality no longer said what they wanted to say. They lived in horrific times, and they wanted horrific music. Dutton may well be right that you can have great art without transcendental values, although personally I doubt it, but he has picked a bad example to illustrate his claim. That's what I think.