Transcription
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Art is theft. Pablo Picasso said, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." Bad poets take what they can, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling that is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.
All advice is autobiographical. It's one of my theories that when people give you advice, they're really just talking to themselves in the past. This book is me talking to a previous version of myself. These are things I've learned over almost a decade of trying to figure out how to make art.
But a funny thing happened when I started sharing them with others. I realized that they aren't just for artists; they're for everyone. These ideas apply to anyone who's trying to inject some creativity into their life and their work. That should describe all of us. In other words, this book is for you, whoever you are, whatever you make.
Let's get started.
1. Steal Like an Artist
How to look at the world like an artist. Every artist gets asked the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" The honest artist answers, "I steal them." How does an artist look at the world? First, you figure out what's worth stealing. Then you move on to the next thing. That's about all there is to it.
When you look at the world this way, you stop worrying about what's good and what's bad. There's only stuff worth stealing and stuff that's not worth stealing. Everything is up for grabs. If you don't find something worth stealing today, you might find it worth stealing tomorrow, or a month, or a year from now.
Nothing is original. What is originality? Undetected plagiarism. William Ralph Inge once asked David Bowie if he thought of himself as an original. "Not by any means," he replied. "I'm more like a tasteful thief. The only art I'll ever study is the stuff that I can steal from."
The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something original, nine out of ten times they just don't know the references or the original sources involved. What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.
It's right there in the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:9: "There is nothing new under the sun." Some people find this idea depressing, but it fills me with hope. As the French writer André Gide put it, "Everything that needs to be said has already been said, but since no one was listening, everything must be said again."
If we're free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.
The genealogy of ideas. We were kids without fathers, so we found our fathers on wax and on the streets and in history. We got to pick and choose the ancestors who would inspire the world we were going to make for ourselves.
Jay-Z said, "Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas." A good example of this is genetics. You have a mother and you have a father. You possess features from both of them, but the sum of you is bigger than their parts. You're a remix of your mom and dad and all of your ancestors.
Just as you have a familial genealogy, you also have a genealogy of ideas. You don't get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers, your friends, the music you listen to, the books you read, and the movies you see. You are, in fact, a mashup of what you choose to let into your life. You are the sum of your influences.
The German writer Goethe said, "We are shaped and fashioned by what we love." Garbage in, garbage out. The artist is a collector, not a hoarder. Mind you, there's a difference. Hoarders collect indiscriminately; artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.
There's an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same is true of our idea incomes. You're only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.
My mom used to say to me, "Garbage in, garbage out." It used to drive me nuts, but now I know what she meant. Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.
Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination, says filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light, and shadows.
Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work and theft will be authentic.
Climb your own family tree. Marcel Duchamp said, "I don't believe in art; I believe in artists." This is actually a pretty good method for studying. If you try to devour the history of your discipline all at once, you'll choke. Instead, chew on one thinker, writer, artist, activist, role model you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker.
Then find three people that thinker loved and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you climb your own tree, it's time to grow your own branch.
Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff. I have pictures of my favorite artists in my studio. They're like friendly ghosts. I can almost feel them pushing me forward as I'm hunched over my desk.
The great thing about dead or remote masters is that they can't refuse you as an apprentice. You can learn whatever you want from them. They left their lesson plans in their work.
School yourself. Whether I went to school or not, I would always study. RZA said, "School is one thing; education is another." The two don't always overlap. Whether you're in school or not, it's always your job to get yourself an education.
You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else. That's how you'll get ahead. Google everything. I mean everything. Google your dreams. Google your problems. Don't ask a question before you Google it. You'll either find the answer or you'll come up with a better question.
Always be reading. Go to the library. There's magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It's not the book you start with; it's the book that book leads you to. Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away.
The unread books in your library are just as important as the ones you've read. Don't worry about doing research; just search. Save your thefts for later. Carry a notebook and pen with you wherever you go. Get used to pulling it out and jotting down your thoughts and observations.
Copy your favorite passages out of books. Record overheard conversations. Doodle when you're on the phone. Go to whatever lengths necessary to make sure you always have paper on you.
Artist David Hockney had all the inside pockets of his suit jackets tailored to fit a sketchbook. The musician Arthur Russell liked to wear shirts with two front pockets so he could fill them with scraps of score sheets. The painter Georgia O'Keeffe and the writer Jane Jacobs both wore the same kind of dresses made with big pockets for plenty of paper.
Keep a swipe file. A swipe file is just what it sounds like: a file to keep track of the stuff you've swiped from others. It can be digital or analog; it doesn't matter what form it takes as long as it works. You can keep a scrapbook and cut and paste things into it, or you can just take pictures of things with your camera phone.
See something worth stealing? Put it in the swipe file. Need a little inspiration? Open up the swipe file. Newspaper reporters call this a morgue file. I like that name even better. Your morgue file is where you keep the dead parts that you'll later reanimate in your work.
2. Don't Wait Until You Know Who You Are to Get Started
Make things. Know thyself. When you first get started, there's usually a big gap between what you are and what you want to be. If I'd waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started being creative, well, I'd still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things.
In my experience, it's in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are. You're ready. Start making stuff. You might be scared to start; that's natural.
There's this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It's called impostor syndrome. The clinical definition is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. It means that you feel like a phony, like you're just winging it, that you really don't have any idea what you're doing.
Guess what? None of us do. Ask anybody doing truly creative work, and they'll tell you the truth: they don't know where the good stuff comes from. They just show up to do their thing every day.
Fake it till you make it. You start out as a phony and become real. Glenn O'Brien said, "Have you ever heard of dramaturgy?" It's a fancy term for something William Shakespeare spelled out in his play "As You Like It" about 400 years ago: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts."
Another way to say this: fake it till you make it. I love this phrase. There are two ways to read it. One: pretend to be something you're not until you are. Fake it until you're successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them to.
Or two: pretend to be making something until you actually make something. I love both readings. You have to dress for the job you want, not the job you have, and you have to start doing the work you want to be doing.
I also love the book "Just Kids" by the musician Patti Smith. It's a story about how two friends who wanted to be artists moved to New York. You know how they learned to be artists? They pretended to be artists.
In my favorite scene from which the book gets its title, Patti Smith and her friend, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, dress up in all their Bohemian Gypsy gear and go to Washington Square Park where everybody's hanging out. This old touristy couple is gawking at them. The wife says to her husband, "Oh, take their picture! I think they're artists."
"Oh, go on," the husband disagrees. "They're just kids." The point is, all the world's a stage. Creative work is a kind of theater. The stage is your studio, your desk, or your workstation. The costume is your outfit, your painting pants, your business suit, or that funny hat that helps you think.
The props are your materials, your tools, and your medium. The script is just plain old time—an hour here or an hour there—just time measured out for things to happen.
Fake it till you make it. Start copying. Start copying what you love. Copy, copy, copy, copy. At the end of the copy, you will find yourself.
Yohji Yamamoto said, "Nobody is born with a style or a voice. We don't come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying."
We're talking about practice here, not plagiarism.