Wealth & Money Quote by Simon Raven

A neat little couplet of British acidity: Simon Raven takes two slogans that usually posture as ideals and turns them into a social X-ray. "Art for art's sake" is the old aesthete’s rallying cry, a claim that beauty and craft justify themselves without moral or commercial accounting. Raven lets it stand - then pins it to its grubby twin: "money for God's sake". The joke lands because it sounds like a proverb you half-remember, but the inversion is doing the work. If art gets to be pure, money gets to be sanctified.

The subtext is less about piety than about permission. By invoking God, Raven mocks the way societies launder greed through moral language: charity, duty, legacy, "providing", the respectable little halo placed on accumulation. It’s also a jab at class. In Raven’s England - postwar, still stiff with old hierarchies and new consumer appetites - money talks loudest when it pretends not to. The upper crust can afford to treat art as a private religion, while the market frames its own hunger as necessity, even virtue.

Form matters here: the balanced structure makes it feel like a final verdict, the kind tossed off over drinks but sharpened like a blade. Raven’s intent isn’t to choose sides; it’s to expose the double standard. We romanticize art’s uselessness while moralizing money’s usefulness, and in doing so we protect both worlds from scrutiny.