Is Stealing An Art Form?
Many of the great artists and so-called original thinkers have said, in various forms, that stealing is essential. A common question posed to any great artists is: ‘Where do you get your great ideas from?’ If they answer honestly, they’ll say ‘I steal them.’
More commonly they’ll reply ‘I have aspects of artist A, B, C and a little bit of D,’ or ‘my inspiration comes from…’
Those Who (often) Can’t Do…
Globs of tears were spraying out, uzi-style, all over my left arm and cheek. The assailant was a young university sophomore who was just publicly exposed as a plagiarizer by our literature professor. The professor almost seemed to be savoring her humiliation.
It seemed that she had copied, word-for-word, the work of a student who had the same class-and professor-just two semesters prior.
It was a research paper on Shakespeare. Ironically our pompous professor repeatedly pointed out that Shakespeare had stolen from the Greeks and Romans, talk about sending mixed messages to young impressionable minds…
The young woman seated directly in front of the accused was noticeably leaning forward as if strapped to her desk, and had no other choice but to lean as far forward as possible to survive the teared attack. The public-shaming occurred just before the winter break.
I never saw her again after that fateful day. I was 19 and attending a large university where it was not uncommon to not see classmates ever again. In my gut I knew that she had either dropped out or, more likely, had been expelled from the university.
That was nearly three decades ago. I’ll be 48 in a few more days and cannot help but to appreciate the irony of that wasteful day: the professor punished a powerless student for a breach of university protocol: no student shall steal, take…blah! blah! blah!
Professionally speaking, while working as a copywriter intern for an international pest control company several years ago, the public relations director plagiarized (word-for-word) one of my articles. He didn’t even attempt to paraphrase or change the title.
He used my article as a press release. At the time it really annoyed me. But now? I couldn’t care less. I figured that he was drowning in work and struggling to keep his head above water. He was also going through a rough divorce, which was only exacerbated by a custody battle over their teen-aged daughter.
I actually pitied him. And now it’s a little flattering. After all, isn’t imitation the most sincerest form of flattery?
It’s common knowledge that Shakespeare stole his plots from Greek and Roman plays. It’s also commonly known that practically all of our revered creative geniuses were highly skilled in the art of stealing.
You think that I’m taking gratuitous shots at Shakespeare? I can assure you that I’m not.
Shakespeare was just like anyone else in the arts: he stole.
And he was handsomely rewarded for his great theft, as were many others. In fact, here are several other artistic greats who embraced and extolled the virtues of creative theft:
“Art is theft,” Pablo Picasso
“Art is what you can get away with,” Andy Warhol
“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff that I can steal from,” David Bowie
“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,” T. S. Eliot
“I emulated Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis. We all did,” Paul McCartney when he was with The Beatles
Theft is not limited only to publicly humiliated university students. Even one of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, practically plagiarized the Declaration of Independence from John Locke.
Disillusioned yet? Don’t be.
Even Salvador Dali said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
Copycat this and copycat that!
Think about it. We learn to write by copying the alphabet. Painters learn to paint by copying masterpieces, models and anything else that has already been reproduced.
So now that we have that little integrity conundrum out of the way, who should you copy? Start with your idols-the people who inspire you, the ones you love and the ones you wish to be.
The writer Walter Mizner said if you copy from one author it’s plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it’s research.
The cartoonist, Gary Panter once said, “If you have one person you’re influenced by, everyone will say you’re the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you’re so original.”
The real reason-as I see it-to copy your idols and their style is so that you might get a glimpse into their mindsets, their way of thinking. That’s what’s most desirable, to internalize their perspective of the world.
If you just mimic the surface of somebody’s work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a cheap carbon copy.
So, what are you waiting for? What are your thoughts on this topic?
