"I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" - from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

There is no point in scoring a maximum. Once you have put away ten reds and ten blacks, you may as well stop. You have won the frame. You have 80 points and there are 67 left on the table. Why go on? I know there was fabulous prize-money on offer for the feat at the World Championship in Sheffield, but why? And certainly, players care deeply about making a 147. The money is no more than an acknowledgement of that.

The aim of snooker, the aim of any sport, is to win. But when Ronnie O'Sullivan won the title on Monday, he was cast down. “It's been strange because I'm relieved more than anything else,” he said. “I played good in the semis, but I felt quite uneasy in the final.” But he won. Isn't that enough? Clearly not.

O'Sullivan played with beauty and brilliance at the Crucible, but only in patches. He scored a maximum of almost voluptuous perfection against Mark Williams and his opponent did not concede the frame as the tenth black fell so that we could get on with the business of winning and losing. We can only conclude that a maximum matters beyond mere victory and that sport itself is not only about winning and losing.

As O'Sullivan pursued his 147, every line of his body changed. He had been struggling with his concentration and the contradictions of his nature, but when this opportunity spread itself before him, his mind and his body were at once at maximum arousal. Before, he had been working for nothing more than victory. Now, with a maximum in his sights, there was something worth playing for.

Beauty, that's what. Perfection. The ultimate expression of the snookering man. A 147 displays O'Sullivan as Leonardo da Vinci's encircled and ensquared Vitruvian Man; as the Creator's greatest achievement, the summit of perfection. In those nine minutes, O'Sullivan was not a competitor, but an artist.

But then artistry has always been a concept closer to O'Sullivan's soul than victory. Spectators understand this, know that O'Sullivan, with three World Championships, is in some ways superior to Stephen Hendry, who has seven.

Hendry is a great player, perhaps the greatest, and he is much better at winning tournaments than O'Sullivan. But something in O'Sullivan - something in Hendry, too, something in any sporting audience in the world - will acknowledge that in some ways the artist is superior to the champion. O'Sullivan seeks beauty. He tries to create perfection. In a sense he sees every frame in which he fails to score 147 as a failure. He hates to go slumming and scrabbling for victory, nicking a frame here, punishing a slip-up there. Although pursuit of victory is a part of what he does, the pursuit of beauty exists alongside and is dominant.

This creates contradictory demands, destructive tensions, mood swings, inappropriate responses; and occasionally a run of staggering beauty and perfection. And it is for this that he is loved above all other players, just as the other neurotic geniuses of his sport - Alex Higgins, Jimmy White - were loved.

People respond to artistry, to O'Sullivan's pursuit of something beyond victory. We are all artists. We love to create: creation from nothing, a human's traditional usurpation of God. Some create the Mona Lisa, others a chocolate mousse, or a fine set of shelves, or a garden, or a song in the bath. Some of us have a thicker streak of artistry than others, that's all, and this truth has always held good in sport.

Some see life as a competition in which you try to earn more money than everyone else. Other people seek something else, work in which they can create some form of beauty, achieve some kind of inner satisfaction, live a life with more beauty. The analogy is not exact, but in sport - which is specifically formatted to create competition - there are those who seek something else. Sometimes this desire to create takes inappropriate and self-indulgent forms. In football we have the fanny-merchant; at his worst, a pseudo-artist, celebrating not art and beauty but himself. George Best was a fanny-merchant of genius, but then in truly great players we sometimes find that the artist and the winner have reached some kind of accord.

Arsène Wenger is a man cursed or blessed by his artistic vision. He would sooner lose with beauty than win with ugliness. Is this the weakness or the strength of the Arsenal team he manages? Sport makes uncompromising judgments. Arsenal tried to win four trophies and won none this season, so Arsenal failed. No one could argue with that: sport specialises in such plain, objective truths. But Arsenal did not seek victory alone. They sought something else, and some will say they found it. It's a subjective judgment, but that's art for you.

We who watch sport are always seeking aesthetic gratification. Many believe that the creation of beauty is a moral duty for a footballer. Those who watch rugby long to see fast, flowing passing movements. In cricket, the notion of greatness often has an aesthetic bias. Many will say that David Gower was a greater player than Graham Gooch because he was more beautiful to watch. Gower was elevated and bedevilled by his artistry, a fact beyond the comprehension of Gooch.

I have always celebrated most loudly the athletes who best encapsulate a high and lonely purity of action and ambition, who eschew frills, who have moved beyond ego, who seek victory to the exclusion of all else. Such great men as Steve Redgrave and Pete Sampras: men without artistry, men who have, in a sense, moved beyond such a concept.

Singleness of aim, purity of purpose, perfection of achievement - that's what I admire above all. But if you deny that beauty and artistry exist in sport, you are only saying that you lack these qualities in yourself. There are those in every sport who do not seek victory alone, people for whom the pursuit of beauty is part of sport, and sometimes a more important one than victory.

In Roger Federer, as in Best, you find an artist and a winner in perfect sympathy - at least you did before this calendar year and Federer's decline began. Andy Murray is an artist whose desire for perfection consistently obstructs his ability to win and he will start playing a drop shot to every ball just so that he can hate himself when he fails.

Sport is not about the creation of beauty, but beauty is a regular by-product. It is human nature - at least, the nature of some humans - to seek out this beauty, to pursue this perfection, sometimes at the expense of sport's ostensible purpose: that is to say, victory. Dangerous stuff, as O'Sullivan has learnt, something that has more than once come close to destroying him. It destroyed Best, it destroyed Muhammad Ali. But art is always dangerous, for its consumers and its creators.