Steal Like an Artist

"Art is theft." Picasso said it, or at least that line has been put in his mouth so often that it has stopped mattering who said it first, which is, conveniently, the entire premise of the book Austin Kleon built around the idea. T. S. Eliot said something close: immature poets imitate, mature poets steal, bad poets deface what they take, and good poets weld their theft into a whole of feeling that is unique. Kleon took those two sentences, added eight more of his own, illustrated all of them, and produced one hundred and sixty pages that now sit on the desks of designers, students, founders, songwriters, and anyone who has ever stared at a blank page and felt like a fraud.

Steal Like an Artist began as a list of ten things Kleon wished someone had told him when he started out. He turned the list into a talk at a community college in 2011, the talk went around the internet, and the book that followed did something almost no creative how-to book manages. It pulled a generation of creators out of the worship of originality. The move is simple. Originality is the story we tell ourselves about people whose sources we cannot see. Every artist you admire is a remix. The point is not to dodge influence, which is impossible, but to choose your influences carefully, steal from them honestly, and let the inevitable failure of your copying become the thing that is finally yours. What follows walks through Kleon's ten principles in order, with the stories he uses to anchor them and the practical edges that make this book stick when so many others slide off.

Steal Like an Artist

The first chapter opens with a question that sounds aggressive until you sit with it. When an artist looks at the world, what is the only question they are really asking? Kleon's answer, borrowed from David Bowie, is "what is worth stealing?" Bowie called himself a tasteful thief and said the only art he would study was the stuff he could lift from. That is the posture the whole book wants you to inherit.