Five For Your Hive: Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
Great artists steal, there isn't a move that's a new move, they left their lesson plans in their work, gathered flowers, it all came back to me.
I’ve got two things to share:
I’m fine-tuning the way I share content here. Instead of just sharing long-form essays, I’ll be sharing five insights I’ve discovered over the week, centered around a particular theme. It will be called “Five For Your Hive”. It’s bite-sized, straight to the point, and therefore easier to relate it to your own life. These five insights still serve the purpose of helping you to become more creative and better at life. With regards to writing/photography tips, it will be shared via long-form essays which I aim to produce every now and then.
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Five For Your Hive: Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
Great artists steal
In the summer of 1979, Xerox’s venture capital division wanted to invest in Apple. “I will let you invest a million dollars,” Jobs said, “if you will open the Kimono at PARC.” Xerox offered to show its newest technology in exchange for 100,000 shares at $10 each. Jobs agreed. Xerox management placed Larry Tesler in-charge of the briefings to Jobs and his team. His colleague, Adele Goldberg, however, was appalled. “It was incredibly stupid,” she said. For her company to “give away its crown jewels”, she recalled, “was completely nuts!” At first, Tesler was instructed to show the unclassified version of Smalltalk, the programming language developed by Xerox. But when Jobs phoned the head of the Xerox to complain about not getting the “full thing”, Tesler was forced to draw the curtains: the graphical user interface—known as GUI—made possible by bitmap technology. The Apple folks were astonished. “This is it!” Jobs shouted in the car on the way back to Cupertino, “we’ve got to do it!” That moment was described by Jobs as when his “eyes were being unveiled” to what “the future of computing was destined to be.” Until then, most computers were character-mapped, that is, you type a character on the keyboard, and the computer would generate that character on a screen. In a bitmap system, however, every pixel on the screen is controlled by bits in the computer’s memory. To render a letter on a screen, for example, the computer has to tell each pixel to be light or dark or what colour to be. It was power-intensive, but the outcome was a gorgeous array of graphics and fonts and display. That day on, Apple engineers significantly improved and implemented the GUI technology in ways that Xerox never could accomplish. When asked years later about what was described as one of the biggest heists in the industry, Jobs would endorsed this view with pride. “Picasso had a saying,” he said, “‘good artists copy, great artists steal’”, and for the culture at Apple, “we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
There isn’t a move that’s a new move
It all started when Kobe Bryant was ten years old and living with his family in Italy, where his father Joe “Jelly Bean” Bryant, played pro basketball after an eight-year NBA career. Kobe’s grandfather would sent over tapes of NBA broadcast which Kobe would devour with his father. “Watch this”, Kobe recalled his dad saying, “See this guy? This is how you can make use of your left hand.” Contrary to popular belief, Kobe wasn’t a big guy. “I knew for me to get any type of edge whatsoever,” Kobe said, “I had to be more prepared than the person I was matching up against.” So he did this by watching every move of other players and imitating them during practice. But when he realised he couldn’t completely pull them off because he didn’t have the same body type as the guys he was imitating, he had to adapt to make them as his own. “I have stolen all my moves from the greatest players,“ Kobe admitted, “there isn’t a move that’s a new move.” Imitate and emulate—that’s the name of the game.
They left their lesson plans in their work
Painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp once said, “I don’t believe in art. I believe in the artist.” To the author Austin Kleon, this was really good advice for those studying their field. “If you try to devour the history of your discipline all at once,” Kleon wrote, “you’ll choke.” Instead of being siloed, Kleon suggested to draw out a bottom-up family tree. You begin by zooming in on someone you admire and then studying everything there is to know about that person. Thereafter, branch out the links by finding “three people that this person loved.” Expound as much as you can, and repeat. The outcome is you are slotting yourself into “a creative lineage that will help you feel less alone” as you produce your own work. The great thing about this family tree is that the people can’t refuse you as their apprentice. Their work is for your admiration, for your stealing. “Learn whatever you want from them,” Kleon said, “they left their lesson plans in their work.”
Gathered flowers
When social scientist and author Brian Klass was asked for advice on finding great ideas, he revealed an astounding secret—he thieves. But what he is guilty of is not a crime, but creativity. “In the Middle Ages,” he wrote, “beautifully illustrated anthologies of writing were produced called florilegia, which means ‘gathered flowers’—wise written snippets taken from sages past and present, smooshed together and bound.” Ideas come together from everywhere— various fields, timelines, cultures—to build upon each other. They accumulate. They multiply exponentially. Therefore, the best ideas, Klass said, “emerge when writers plant that knowledge somewhere a little different.” Gather all that you know and don’t know and then bundle them into something new.
It all came back to me
In 1972, Jobs walked into his first ever calligraphy class in Reed College. Sixty minutes later, he walked out a different man, entranced by the beauty and precision of handwritten lettering. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college,” Jobs said, “the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.” Jobs stole what he learned from a college calligraphy class and planted them into the world of typography, the world of self-expression. “When the team was designing the first Macintosh computer,” Jobs said, “it all came back to me.” And because the Mac employed a bitmapped display, it allowed for a variety of fonts which could be rendered pixel by pixel on the screen. It has been said—good artists copy, great artists steal. And yet they don’t just steal. They imitate. They emulate. They gather. And they were shameless in doing so.