W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake

This idea of art for art's sake is a hoax.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic.

I don't believe that artists really are interested in money. That's not the motivation for art.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

The saying "the business of art is different than the purpose of art" makes sense, and what are you going to do about that? You have some obligation to get the work out there, you believe in it enough that it should be out in the public, but of course it goes through a system that takes it pretty far away from the reasons you made them.

Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.

Art isn't and shouldn't be responsible. If it is, it isn't functioning as art.

There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. ... Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.

My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, although it can adopt that style.