Art & Creativity Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Contempt” is a deliberately rude engine for a sentence about beauty. Fitzgerald isn’t selling the cozy idea that great art is simply bigger, purer, or more inspired. He frames it as an act of refusal: a great artist defining himself by what he won’t do, what he won’t flatter, what he won’t settle for. The line performs a kind of aesthetic class warfare. “Small art” isn’t just bad art; it’s art that plays it safe, trades in easy effects, repeats fashionable tricks, or panders to an audience’s appetite for the familiar. To make “great art,” Fitzgerald implies, you need the stomach to look at those temptations and feel something harsher than mere disinterest.

The subtext is as much about ego as ethics. “Great man” is loaded with old-world bravado and a whiff of self-mythologizing, as if artistic greatness requires an almost aristocratic pride. That’s very Fitzgerald: a writer obsessed with status, taste, and the humiliations of wanting approval. Contempt becomes a defense mechanism against the marketplace and its constant pressure to produce “small” work that sells, trends, or politely entertains.

Context matters: Fitzgerald wrote amid the rise of mass culture, magazines, advertising, and a booming appetite for slick, consumable stories. He himself made serious money writing popular fiction while aiming for literary immortality. This line reads like a private self-warning from a man who knew exactly how seductive “small art” could be, especially when it paid the rent. It works because it’s not serene or motivational; it’s combative, admitting that greatness sometimes begins as disgust.