"Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal" - How can this concept be supported & explained by a designer?

Question

"Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal"

This is the most famous version of the concept described by so many great artists, yet, as a designer/artist, I'm not sure how I would explain it.

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The general concept can be traced back to many great artists throughout recent history:

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal." - poet T. S. Eliot

“Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.” - Lionel Trilling

“Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal.” - Igor Stravinsky

“Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” - Pablo Picasso (according to Steve Jobs)

It seems to me that the word "steal" implies plagiarism, which certainly could not make for a great artist nor designer?

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How is this saying explained and supported from the standpoint of an artist and/or designer?

Answer 1

I've always interpreted this as a more literal reference to the possession that "stealing" implies. If you've truly stolen something, then it is no longer owned by anyone else. Nor is it a copy. It's owned by you. There's the old saying that "possession is 9/10 of the law".

Steal your inspiration, and own the results.

I don't think anyone has truly confirmed the quote attribution of Picasso by Steve Jobs. Perhaps it's more likely his own words that have gained fame, which he prefaced with:

It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that Humans have done, and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing.

An Apple executive gave a similar opinion when asked about the quote in a CNET interview:

"I think people focus on the Picasso statement and focus on the word 'steal,'" said Bud Tribble, Apple's vice president of software technology and leader of the Macintosh software team during its infancy. "If you take that word, which is kind of pejorative, and replace it with 'make it your own,' I think the underlying idea is that you can't do great design by copying something because you aren't going to care about it. If you take something and make it your own, what really happens is now you care about that design. It's your design and that is the dividing line between copying and stealing...

Answer 2

Einstein said "The key to originality is hiding your sources". You're right, it's a concept that's been commented on by many great artists, the concept though I think is less literal than you're reading it. I think it's about originality. The idea is that there are no truly original thoughts and thus there is no truly original creation, everyone is influenced by the world around them. Good artists understand how to borrow from the world around them, but it takes a great artist to mask their theft.

Answer 3

Those sayings also remind me of a scripture:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. -Ecclesiastes 1:9

Stay with me...

That being said, I'm currently finishing up a class on the History of Animation which is quite interesting. One of the films we studied was a German film done in 1943 called Der Schneeman (The Snowman).

In this film, a snowman desires to see what summer is like, so he hides in the freezer of an unoccupied house until Julio (July). He succeeds and enjoys frolicking in the flowers. The character story and design was uncanny to Frozen's Olaf, who many of you will know that he sings a song in the movie about "What I would do in Summer!".

After pointing this out to the instructor, he tells me that many of the current animators at Disney have taken his class.

The key to great art is knowing what to steal.

Answer 4

"If you're already front-end developer/designer, well, pretend you're also wearing a pirate hat" -Ethan Marcotte, Responsive Web Design 2011

Jony Ive, a genius of beautiful, minimalist design. But his most creations bear a more than passing resemblance to the work of another design genius, Dieter Rams of Braun. They look the same but what the products do is quite different.

"If people copy your work it is more like a compliment."

Remember we are copying nature right from the beginning of mankind. We copy we learn and we make mistakes, we make things better and then transfer the same to others for further desired improvements accordingly and that's how a great design evolves.

Copying some great designers is a kind of “compliment rather than shallow copying.”

“Design is not how things look, but how they work.”

The above small thing to read makes the key difference.!!

And at the end of day, I think it doesn't matter from where the design evolved

"Design is done when problem goes away."

Answer 5

Original ideas exist, but are rare. They are also usually fairly minor in scope. To capitalize on this you need a framework of other ideas to build upon. So the most efficient way to come with new ideas is to recombine known ideas. Just because all the pieces are known does not mean the new combination is without worth.

So even truly original ideas need the support of known things. Therefore it is important to recognize an idea for reuse, possibly in a new context.If you were to innovate all yourself, you would end up with something mediocre at best. In addition you would spend a lot of time developing something somebody already did. Knowing what exists allows you to choose more optimal choices. New is also unknown so you swap known downsides with unknown ones when you make truly new stuff. Choose your battles, innovate where it counts most. Or just do better recombination.

Ownership of ideas is also fairly arbitrary. You can be attributed for the idea for several reasons. Watt didn't invent the steam engine, yet is attributed as the man behind steam engines. Pythagoras didn't invent the Pythagorean theorem. And Newton borrowed more than anybody else, but then that was his point, and greatest contribution.

In the end its about making best possible choices. Known things are more informed choices. New things can be recombined out of old ideas and ultimately the ownership of an idea is up for grabs until it has been assigned to somebody who did it better or has better marketing skill. Design is making it better not differently and equally well. The one who succeeds in building the best possible combination is the one to be remembered, not the one who came up with the general idea.

Answer 6

One of the first topics I wrote about on my journal is this one. I'll paraphrase and repost some of it here to share:

New forms do not come from nothing, not for us humans at any rate; they come from prior forms, through mutations, whether un- sought or invited. In a fundamental sense, there are no theories of creation; there are only accounts of the development of new forms from earlier forms.

- Frank Barron

When I was an undergraduate student I took a number of philosophy courses. That was when I first learnt (I recently learnt that learnt is a word in British spelling which is good enough for me because I’ve always felt it more linguistically acceptable than learned) that man does not have the capacity to truly create something out of nothing. The professor I had was Sean Allen-Hermanson (Faculty Profile) and the example he gave us was the unicorn. A unicorn he explained as a horse with a spiral horn not as anything truly new. In my research I now understand this to be Conceptual Blending (Further Reading).

As a designer what interests me in this are two things:

1. Just the ideas behind it and understanding more about how creativity works
2. Realizing that while seemingly more “creative” the more you are able to break away, perhaps the worse the results will be.

What that second point means is that for example and used in studies one might ask a person to design an extraterrestrial. Some will envision things based off familiar ideas say a little green martian which looks strikingly like humans but smaller, with antennae and green skin. Others will deviate from this which is apparently more creative. However, the further from the reality which is known by the audience the less the audience can relate. An example might be in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer when Galactus was portrayed as a cloud. Fans and critics were disappointed and newcomers were confused. Simply put – it is interesting and extremely creative to come up with a being that exists as a mass of gasses, however it is very difficult to relate to.

One of my favorite conceptual Architect’s, Lebbeus Woods, imagines worlds where things are off-axis, physics may function differently, we may function differently. The results are incredibly interesting studies of how space may exist and in a sense how space does already exist.

Further Reading:

Creative cognition as a window on creativity - Thomas B. Ward

A Design Research: The creative cognitive approach in the processes of shaping and making of a place - Gokce Ketizmen Onal

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To now try to relate this more to the question posed here:

We as human beings don't have the capacity to come up with entirely new concepts. The phrasing "Good artists copy; great artists steal" is towards the idea that a good artist will in fact copy a good work. But a great one modifies it which is in fact theft of the idea. Its a hugely simplistic phrasing but then that's why its memorable.

Answer 7

The quote refers to mastery.

When one who is not a master takes from another, it is copying, a shallow imitation. The original was authentic, but this is just a copy.

But when a master takes from another, everything from a master is authentic. The master will breathe fresh life into it.

It will be reborn through the master, and given its own life. It has been completely disconnected from any previous context.

To steal is to make your own.

Jesus may steal from Buddha. Because he perceives the same truth, Buddha's words through Jesus will be authentic. They have now become Jesus' words.

But the priest does not have the inspiration, he will not be able to steal. He does not know this truth, he has not tasted it. He may try to take Buddha's words, but they will remain with Buddha. There is no authenticity. He is just copying.

It is a very beautiful quote, because to steal is commonly understood as something surreptitious, as something negative. And it turns this understanding completely on its head.

Answer 8

To literally answer your specific question,

(1) there's nothing you can do to "support" the idea one way or the other.

there's any number of examples of "references/homage/copying" in great art, and, there's any number of examples of true originality in great art.

(2) regarding "explaining" the idea, there's not much to explain. An explanation in English is: "very often in art or design, you see references/homage/copying"

What's your specific "use case?"

Are you having trouble explaining to a client why something you did looks like something else, or what?

Answer 9

If you steal work from others, you're not a real artist. If Igor Strawinsky became famous for stolen musical pieces, then the original composer(s) are more likely the ones to give credit for.

It's different if it's about getting inspiration from other artists. Everyone gets inspiration from other sources

Also, I'm probably going to get a lot of hate for this, but don't listen to Steve Jobs. He was arrogant and a liar, sorry to say. He was also someone with great creativity and vision, but still, not someone whose statements were reliable.