Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Quillen

A neat little provocation: if art is hard, it must be smuggling in a motive. Quillen, a journalist with a newspaperman’s allergy to sanctimony, punctures the romantic pose that “true” artists toil in pure, self-contained rapture. His line works because it flatters effort while refusing to sentimentalize it. Great art, he implies, isn’t a hobby elevated by talent; it’s labor so punishing that only necessity justifies it.

The subtext is less anti-art than anti-mystique. “For its own sake” is the target: the idea that art floats above appetite, ego, money, status, revenge, seduction, grief, politics. Quillen’s cynicism reads like a corrective to a culture that uses “art” as an alibi for indulgence. The barb lands in the second sentence: “too difficult to be worth the effort.” That’s not a dismissal of difficulty; it’s an insistence that difficulty demands stakes. Real stakes: rent, legacy, obsession, a point to prove, a wound to cauterize, a world to change. In that frame, “greatness” becomes evidence of pressure.

Context matters. Quillen wrote in an America where mass media was expanding, taste was being industrialized, and artists were increasingly asked to justify themselves either as prophets or as entertainers. A journalist’s pragmatism meets modernity’s marketing: if “art for art’s sake” can be a slogan, it can also be a cover story. Quillen isn’t saying purity is impossible; he’s saying purity is rarely powerful enough to finish the job.