“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
What does this maxim mean? Why do people like to repeat it now? Something smells fishy. People seem to think this is about taking shortcuts, but it’s nearly the antithesis.
The misinterpretation
This quote has become something so popular that people regurgitate it in conversations not even about art, which is how I originally heard it. My instant internal reaction was, “bullshit”. But, it seems both myself and many of those who actually like this quote got it wrong.
Without context, I fear the meme is so misleading as to be used to justify flagrantly ripping off other artists, mindless appropriation, and the self-defeating and false notion that originality and novelty are impossible. On the face of it, it seems to say that good artists imitate, but the greats fully plagiarize. There’s even a misquote of T.S. Eliot saying precisely that (from a 1949 article in The Atlantic): “T. S. Eliot once wrote that the immature poet imitates and the mature poet plagiarizes.”
The maxim is most often attributed to Picasso, and thus functions to meld an artist popularly revered as a paragon of innovation with its opposite – merely stealing the work of others and taking all the credit for it. Note that Steve Jobs famously attributed the saying to Picasso, but Picasso is not famous for saying it, and many question whether he ever said it.
To get a fresh perspective, I asked my girlfriend what she thought the quote meant, and why people liked it. I’d already researched the quote, and had a good idea of what it meant in its historical context, so I was particularly interested in what impression someone got without knowing the real meaning. What she came up with substantiated my worst suspicions. Here are some bits I typed while she was talking:
“Nothing is sacred. Anything goes. Things like sampling in music. Taking something and making it your own. It’s a battle cry for entrepreneurs, because you don’t have to create anything on your own. Originality is dead. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make a lot of money, to get your name out there, be popular and well known. It’s being clever enough to see an opportunity where others didn’t. Not having to give credit.”
She really nailed it, and she also later guessed what the quote really means.
In short, the contemporary misreading is that savvy artists know what is good, don’t have a problem with a little cheating, and wisely take from others rather than innovate for themselves. They don’t even bother to learn how to imitate, but instead move directly to taking something outright, repackaging it, branding it with their own names, and marketing it. This is a common enough paradigm in contemporary art, and hence part of its appeal (the appropriation of Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Damien Hirst comes to mind…).
Richard Prince printed out other people’s Instagram posts, with his not-so-witty comments on them, as HIS series. Some sued him in response.
an internal flaw in the argument of the misinterpretation
If great artists steal, who the hell do they steal from? It can’t be from other great artists, who also steal. Do we steal from second and third rate artists? Or is there a time in the past when great artists were originators, and do we then just keep recycling their achievements? If that’s the case, at what point did great artists shift from originating to stealing?
It seems as though stealing is intended as requiring even less dedication than copying, but this is an inverse of the original meaning of the argument, which becomes obvious when we trace the quote back to its probable origins.
“Hennessy, The Civilized Way to Lay Down the Law ” by Jeff Koons. Oil inks on canvas, 45 x 60 inches. A liquor ad painstakingly copied by a team of Jeff Koons’ assistants.
What did the maxim really mean?
This argument first appeared in 1892, in an article by W. H. Davenport Adams titled, “Imitators and Plagiarists”. The author was writing about Alfred Tennyson:
“great poets imitate and improve, whereas small ones steal and spoil.”
Not only does this earliest version of the meme mean the exact opposite of its latest incarnation, it also makes perfect sense. Here the bad poets merely steal something and fudge it a little to be their own, whereas the real poets learn from their predecessors and improve on the recipe. But have the words been switched around and the original meaning retained, or has the meaning been inverted as well?
Over 25 years later T.S. Eliot published “The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism”, in which he wrote:
“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.”
Here we see the words imitate and steal have switched, but the original meaning is intact.
W. H. Davenport Adams
T.S Eliot
small [poets] steal and spoil
bad poets deface what they take
great poets imitate and improve
good poets make [what they take] into something better, or at least something different.
T. S. Eliot
Eliot’s further explanation couldn’t be more clear. The work of the good poet is completely different from the source from which it borrows, and integrated into a unique whole. This does not support the wholesale plagiarizing of someone else’s art, nor does it place the crafty opportunist who knows a good thing when he sees it, and how to re-brand it as his own, above the poet. The good poet needs to have the skill, breadth and scope to integrate inspirational sources into his or her own material. What is confusing people, I think, is the word steal. Eliot used it to mean a complete assimilation of a style into ones own art, but most people will generally think of plagiarism.
what did Picasso mean?
It’s still possible that Picasso could have meant something other than Eliot or Adams. There are two quotes that shed light on Picasso’s intent, assuming he really said them. According to Wikiquote, the statement “Good artists copy, great artists steal” comes from a 1989 article in InfoWorld, long after the artist died. The second quote comes from a 1965 article in Thought, and thus seems less arguably inauthentic:
“When there’s anything to steal, I steal”
Here I imagine an amoeba engulfing other protozoans.
The Amoeba encircling its prey.
Another possible way to say it is that in the search for truth, the seeker of truth will take clues from anywhere and everywhere. Or perhaps a martial arts analogy would work. In the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a fighter may have a deadly move that decisively wins a lot of bouts, such as when Ronda Rousey won nine matches in the first round with armbar submissions.
Ronda Rousey won the Strikeforce 135 Pound Women’s Title with over Miesha Tate with an armbar submission in the first round.
If you are going to fight in UFC, you would be wise to learn this move well, and how to defend against it. We could say you were stealing her move. Meanwhile she learned the armbar from her Judo instructor, who was himself a two-time Olympic bronze medal winner. In mixed martial arts, you can’t afford to give an opponent exclusive rights to a strike or maneuver. And so it came to pass, that, while Ronda had a deadly move up her proverbial sleeve, she also had an Achilles heel, which was her standing game. At the peak of her adulation and celebrity she suffered a devastating loss to veteran kickboxer, Holly Holm, when she was knocked out with a head kick.
Queen of the armbar destroyed by the Preacher’s Daughter’s roundhouse kick to the jaw.
This is an aside, but this defeat reminded me at the time how an athlete who was being heralded as the best pound for pound fighter in the world was utterly crushed by a bruising reality check outside of that belief bubble. A year later and Ronda got back in the ring for it to happen again, when Amanda Nunes knocked her out in the first minute with a volley of punches, which were perhaps more of a slap to the ego than hits in the head. Over-inflated artists, on the other hand, can bask in the self-delusional bubble of glory without an outside reality check for decades on end.
You can’t be a rarefied specialist in mixed martial arts. You can’t be like a Warhol who cornered fashionable surfaces absent of substance. You have to be well-rounded, and this might apply to the best artists as well, but don’t quote me on that.
Even more obvious than MMA, in Chess, you must study, or steal the strategies of others and incorporate them into your game. You can’t just work on YOUR opening strategy.
Boris Spassky Vs. Bobby Fischer, in 1970. You must steal your opponent’s strategy and encapsulate it into your own in order to win.
Often artists borrow from other artists, including their contemporaries, and it’s not a bad thing. The Impressionists and Post-Impressionists learned from one another. Paul Signac, for example, decided to become a painter when he was 18, after seeing an exhibit of the works of Monet, and his early works were in a decidedly Impressionist style.
Port en Bessin, the Beach, by Paul Signac: 1883
After meeting Georges Seurat in 1884, Signac began to experiment with Pointillism and contributed to developing the style.
Golfe-Juan, by Paul Signac. 1896 [Click for much larger version]
Later, Signac was introduced to Van Gogh, and the two artists would paint landscapes and cafes together along the river Seine. You can see the influence of Pointillism in some of Van Gogh’s canvases, including the following self-portrait.
Detail of Van Gogh’s, Self Portrait of 1887 plainly shows the influence of Pointillism.
Related: See my “Van Gogh Self-Portrait With Cut Ear” tribute painting here.
Picasso was, in turn, influenced by Van Gogh, and you can see his attempt at Vincent’s thick, directional brush strokes in his portrait of his friend who had committed suicide, Death of Casagemas, of 1901.
Death of Casagemas, by Picasso: 1901. He hadn’t really harnessed Van Gogh’s method.
Early on Picasso notably borrowed from Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Van Gogh, then Iberian and African art …
I think in his use of African art, we can see what Picasso meant by stealing versus copying. Allegedly, Picasso had a revelation upon seeing the African art collection in a Parisian ethnographic museum, and was inspired with another avenue of taking painting away from traditional naturalism.
19th century mask similar to those which influenced Picasso.
The good artist would merely make drawings or paintings OF the masks, or attempt to physically recreate them as they are. But the great artist, according to Picasso’s terms, would integrate what he’d learned into the fabric of his own creations, such as he did in his infamous Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, by Picasso, 1907.
Picasso’s use of steal is consistent with Eliot’s, it’s the incorporating of another approach, or technique into ones own, and not merely aping the finished product, or repackaging it with a twist of lime. How well Picasso actually embodied the styles of Van Gogh or African art is another issue. Perhaps I should touch upon that.
Was Picasso a Great Thief?
For all his purported ground-breaking innovations, Picasso is an oddly limited artist. He died in 1973, which means that chronologically his life completely eclipsed some of the biggest art movements of the 20th century – including Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop-Art, and Conceptual Art – but worked until the end as if they never happened. Not only did he never make a fully abstract image, his art revolved around some of the most conventional and even hackneyed subjects – self-portraiture, artist and model, still lifes, nudes, and mythological material.
While Picasso continued to work until his death, at 91, and even improved up until the end, he persisted with an early 1900’s paradigm. Georges Braque once said:
“Pablo? Oh, Pablo used to be a good painter; now he’s just a genius.”
This is a cutting comment, as it highlights the element in Picasso’s paintings that they are not so much great themselves as they are indicators of the greatness of their virtuoso creator.
Dove scratch napkin fodder.
Picasso was a bit like a kid whose doting parents tape his most careless scribbles on the refrigerator with excessive praise. He seems to have believed anything he tossed off was priceless, unalloyed brilliance. Paintings executed in an afternoon were exchanged for homes the rest of us spend lifetimes saving for. I suppose a more direct way of saying it is that a lot of his work is half-assed, and he didn’t feel he really had to push himself to get recognition. Picasso was the uber-genius long after the idea of “genius” fell out of favor and became a cringe-worthy sign of narcissistic immaturity.
Within his faith that he was the genius of the century, which allowed him to paint early 20th century art into the 1970s, he did do some marvelously eccentric things. And there is an alternative to the dangerous notion that one ism is replaced by another and rendered impotent in a linear development of art: artists express their own idiosyncratic individuality irrespective of trends happening around them. Picasso is an epitome of the latter, sheltered by his own fame, fortune, and “genius” to evolve in his own peculiar way, in an ivory tower. The risk of self-parody and inbrededness aside, it may be better to be relatively oblivious to successive waves of evolving trends than to be permanently sandwiched in one. [A bit of a tangent, but I wonder whether the premature deaths of Rothko and Pollock might have something to do with working in styles which were linked to an ism which had been superseded by successive waves of isms in which case the artists become antiquated along with their styles.]
Below, in his late years, Picasso’s paintings became more loose, brushy, and expressive, even if an arcane stylization of his personal iconography. As original as this art is, it’s strange to think it was painted eight years after Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans. That, however, does not take away from it, and I prefer this painting to most his Analytical Cubist work, which I find a bit too nauseatingly green and orange and angular. His vision matured and distilled, whether or not it did so in concurrence with wide-sweeping, popular, artistic movements.
The matador and woman Е l`oiseau, by Picasso: 1970.
Can Picasso really have absorbed African art into the broader scope of his own artistic practice, or, is it much more likely that he could hardly fathom what African masks meant to the culture in which they were created? His assimilation of Van Gogh was merely thick brushstrokes with primary colors, but without Van Gogh’s orientation to color (Picasso was never as good of a colorist as Van Gogh), or the intention behind his directional brush strokes.
Picasso’s quote was, I dare say, bluster from an over-inflated ego that even he didn’t live up to, let alone those who glibly quote him in order to glorify pilfering from the hard-won originality of others.
Why is this misinterpreted quote so popular now?
Today stealing from other artists, musicians or writers is easier than ever. It’s as simple as ctrl+c, ctrl+v. When everyone can be an art thief, everyone has an interest in doing so being justified by artists themselves. If Picasso says stealing is what great artists do, than we can all feel good about stealing from other artists, including Picasso. In design, if you like a website, or some packaging, just copy it outright and put your own logo on it. Call it a day. Congratulate yourself as being better than the person you copied from, because more savvy. If you have a better marketing strategy, or more money to throw at promotion, than you can assure yourself that marketing strategies are art, and making money is art. You can find quotes from Warhol and others to support these further conclusions.
Of course, some may use the quote today to mean it exactly as intended, to learn from other creators and integrate it with your own vision into a unique whole, which is sound advice. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
The quote can also be used to substantiate common contemporary art practices such as appropriation, some of which is valid (David Salle, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Claes Oldenburg, Glenn Brown, John Baledessari …) and some that goes too far (Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, and Richard Prince). Koons, Hirst, and Prince have all been sued for plagiarism more than once, with Hirst in the lead, having eight cases against him. The paradigm in which the great artist literally steals substantiates the practices of these latter appropriationists. Let’s take a look at some of their excesses, and why we might not want to underpin their production with the quote from Picasso.
Bad artists copy, jeff koons steals
Koons has stolen from his contemporaries, but I’d like to focus on his theft from old masters. In a recent series he selected great paintings from art history, and had his assistants make larger-than-life copies of them using a tedious paint-by-number system (making them into human oil paint printers). He then affixed his trademark shiny blue gazing ball on the paintings, thus, by his logic, improving upon them.
Gazing Ball (Manet Luncheon on the Grass). Koons’ trademark shiny blue ball in front of a copy of a Manet painting, as painted by Koons’ assistants.
Above we have a very literal copy of Manet’s classic painting. Surely, Koons’ assistants’ reproduction doesn’t compare with the original, in which case the ball alone is supposed to transform it into something better. And the same damned ball, in the same color, and in the vertical center is supposed to improve each painting. This isn’t the mastering and assimilating past styles into ones own that Eliot recommended. These paintings trivialize the original works and bottom out their mystery. The gold leaf in a Klimt painting – one of his peculiar contributions – is replaced with mere gold paint.
Gazing Ball (Klimt: the Kiss), by Jeff Koons.
Koons wants to accrue to himself the skill and vision of these past great painters, thus making himself an all-time great painter in the bargain. He even asserts that he improved upon the original paintings:
“These paintings are stronger being together with the gazing ball. If you take away the gazing ball, they don’t have the same power. They don’t have the same phenomenology taking place. These paintings are masterpieces in their own time, but in this time, this moment, they’re most powerful in this state, with this gazing ball.”
Most would never presume to improve on a “masterpiece”, but, Koons can kick it up to eleven. Koons literally stole completed artworks, in their entirely, branded them with his trademark, and then presumed to somehow make them even better, and take credit for them.
Jeff Koons’ improvement upon the Mona Lisa.
You can’t improve on the Mona Lisa, Jeff, but I had a better idea of how to have fun with them. If we are going to attach a 3D object front and center, how about a ceramic doughnut? You could choose the type of doughnut in accordance with the painting, and serve donuts at the exhibit, for free.
Behold!
If only Jeff Koons had thought of this, rather than me. Oh well. Incidentally, this is one of the side benefits of being a digital artist. you can make conceptual art without materials.
bad artists are imitators, bad boys are fooking parasites
Who recognizes this cat?
Damien Hirst is like the schoolyard bully of the contemporary art world, beating up even his friends for their lunch-money. Hirst has lifted ideas from friends and other artists, branded them as his own, inflated their scale and price, and given the original artists the finger. The saddest part isn’t that someday his ego may hit the canvas harder than Ronda Rousey after Holly Holm kicked her in the head, but that those other artists’ careers were destroyed in the process. They can’t exhibit their own work because it’s rejected as too derivative of works which made Damien Hirst internationally famous. Man that’s gotta’ burn, sinking in ignominy because someone else got rich and famous of your own achievement first.
It’s NOT a tribute if the other artist is your contemporary, and you don’t attribute it to him.
Both Koons and Hirst operate as CEOs of art factories, à la the mature and jaded Warhol. And I’ll just mention that Andy painted those 32 soup cans himself (albeit using a non-painterly printing method), and that made them all the better, even if the piece was obviously more about the idea than the execution.
Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962, by Andy Warhol.
Sure, it’s a 32-line one-liner, but clever, and fresh. And there is a performance element of him going through the repetition of painting each nearly identical can, even if it was just the flavors. Ironically, when you pay someone else to do your art for you, as he later did, and Koons and Hirst routinely do, it cheapens it, sorta’ like when pop stars like Madonna or Britney Spears lip-sync live concerts.
Hirst is like a rich CEO in an ideal dream world where there are no applicable patents. In the art world you can’t steal the final manifestation of a work, but you can steal the idea behind it. This is Hirst’s key to success, but why oh why did he not just hire people to come up with ideas for him as well?
Hirst was friends with conceptual artist John Le Kay, visited his studio, drank with him, went to art openings and shows with him, and played badminton in his living room with a basketball. It’s safe to say Damien saw John’s work. Later, Damien produced several pieces closely resembling his work, including a crucified sheep.
Left: “This Is My Body, This Is My Blood” by John Lekay, 1987. Right: “In the Name of the Father”, by Damien Hirst, 2005.
LeKay had this to say about it:
“Damien sees an idea, tweaks it a little bit, tries to make it more commercial. He’s not like an artist inspired by looking inwards. He looks for ideas from other people. It’s superficial. Put both [crucified sheep] together and … it’s the same thing.”
While LeKay has sold nothing for more than £3,500, and can’t live off of his art, Hirst’s sheep, of which he made three, sold for £5.7 million.
LeKay made a series of skulls out of various shiny materials, including cheap Swarovski crystals. Hirst’s most financially ambitious project was a platinum covered human skull covered with 8,601 flawless diamonds, including an enormous pink diamond on the forehead. He hired the jewelers Bentley and Skinner, who had an appointment to the Queen, to create it for him.
Left: skull by LeKay, and right by Hirst.
When Hist produced his skull, For the Love of God in 2007, LeKay received a phone call from a friend, who advised him:
“You won’t believe what Damien has done, he is doing a skull covered in diamonds. It looks just like your work and he is selling it for 100 million dollars.”
LeKay has subsequently articulated his feeling at the time:
“At first I thought it might be some kind of a joke, and I laughed, then I read about it on artnet. I remember feeling these mixed emotions, feeling a bit shocked, but simultaneously flattered by it, then a bit gutted and thought here we go again, even though his was different; different materials etc. I mean diamonds are much more expensive crystals than a urinal cake or Swarovski crystals, but the idea was basically the same. A skull covered with crystals.”
LeKay claims it has become impossible to show his own work, “Because now everyone who sees it now says it looks like a Damien Hirst artwork”.
There are a few other of Hirst’s pieces which remarkably resemble LeKay’s prior works, and a total of 15 pieces that are contested as entirely derivative of other contemporary artists’ work. These include the shark tank, the spin paintings, the dot paintings,