It's never "l'art pour l'art", even if you think it is. Always there is a piece of the artist in there, and what was cooking in the artist's brain at the time of creation. Perhaps without a conscious plan, there is more subjective content than in a deliberate piece.
What does this say? It's not happy piece. The chains are disquieting. Is this what you intended? Maybe not, but that's the impression I get.
Good luck in the contest this week, @seckorama.
The content is certainly subjective, I totally agree, and always carries a piece of the author with it.
I certainly don't want chains and shackles, but sometimes they are there even if we don't want them. But the expression "l'art pour l'art" was invented for a reason.
I know. I actually took a whole semester on it as an undergraduate. 😄 Stumbled into the course (interdisciplinary) as a substitute for a history course (I was a history major). The artists in the movement seemed a little too self aware and full of themselves. Sort of an insistence on elitism. There was a place for the movement of course, as a reaction to what had come before. But I still found the artists a bit egocentric. Not so much art for art's sake but art for the artist's sake😆.
I certainly don't have enough knowledge about all this, and the term art for art's sake seems to me to be the height of arrogance, which reminds me of state artists, I've never followed that genre either, but I had to ask myself that, because there was no goal in this collage, at least not consciously. 😎