Art & Creativity Quote by Mason Cooley

Cooley lands a scalpel-thin distinction in a single line: the same act can be either aesthetic play or a symptom. “Lying just for the fun of it” is pointedly stripped of the usual motives - money, safety, advantage - so what remains is pure performance. That’s why the quote works: it relocates lying from the moral courtroom to a gallery or a clinic. If there’s no external payoff, the lie becomes an end in itself, which is exactly how art justifies its own “usefulness.” A lie can be craft: timing, voice, plausibility, audience-reading. It can also be improvisation, the mind testing reality’s seams.

But Cooley refuses to romanticize it. “Either art or pathology” is a trapdoor. The line flirts with the charming idea of the raconteur, then snaps to the unsettling possibility that compulsive fabrication is less creativity than compulsion. Subtext: our culture loves “good” deception when it entertains us - the tall tale, the persona, the harmless con - and condemns it when it signals inner disorder. The difference is not the act, but the relationship to it: control versus need, play versus panic.

Context matters. Cooley, an aphorist, wrote in the late-20th-century moment when advertising, media spin, and self-invention were increasingly normalized. His sentence reads like a diagnostic for modern life: when fabrication becomes recreational, we’re either witnessing artistry - or watching someone lose their grip on what counts as real.