False. They are there to win, relentlessly. They will use all the tactics and strategies they can bring to bear to accomplish that goal.
The same is true of the excellent athletes I've had the pleasure of coaching, playing with, or knowing when I was the 12 year-old waterboy of a semi-pro football team. If they needed to bunt or hit a home run to win, or punt or throw a pass to win, they did whatever accomplished the goal.
On the other hand, when someone plays the music of Chopin, Brahms, Listz, Schumann, Tchaikovsky and the other Romantic Era greats, where the performer is, according to professional standards, allowed to bend the notes a little to put some of his own feeling into it - THAT is being an artist. When I played Schumann's "First Sorrow" at a recital and put a little pouting and temper-tantrums into the music because I knew Schumann wrote it for his young daughter so it should be a young girl's expressions I wanted to convey, I was so pleased when opera grand-diva Hyunah Yu approached me afterward and said it moved her.
When you take musical lessons in improvisation, you may sit at the piano and be asked to play music representing a fish who is swimming anxiously along in a pond, suddenly leaps out of the water, then returns and swims happily along. In the other arts like dance, painting, creating writing/acting you have to be able to do the same level of expression. You don't get that sort of thing in chess!
Grandmasters are not just chess players, but artists; they enter a match purposefully trying to create a scenario, like painting a picture. (This scenario can be zugzwang, a rook and pawn vs. rook ending, or some other clear goal - but they are focused on only one.)