This blog has been years in the coming, and whether it survives a fortnight is a question yet to be resolved. But if it does manage to survive longer than Wimbledon outside pandemictide, its survival will be much to the credit of Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like an Artist.
If you were to boil Steal Like an Artist down to three emphases, they could be 1) mimic the people you enjoy, 2) follow your passions, and 3) give away what you do.
Of course, the more eye-catching word for mimicry in this instance that Kleon uses is “steal.” Not steal in the sense that a student in freshman English might, after having tuned out all the school’s introductory lessons in plagiarism. This isn’t stealing with ill-intent; rather, what Kleon means by steal is, at base, the recognition that there is nothing that is wholly original, that there is nothing new under the sun. Which is a freeing thought to someone who has been attempting to be “original” for years, and stuck in that expectation that anything worth creating must be wholly new. Originality does not come ex nihilo. Instead, we create from the piles of stuff that we have lying around and refashion them. We are perhaps more than the sum of our parts, but we are not something wholly different from our parts.
Which is where mimicry comes in, and why it’s essential. Aristotle and the philosophers speak of this as mimesis, and it is a rather safe bet that, at its core, all learning is essentially mimicry. We learn by watching and doing the same; hearing and saying the same; reading and writing the same. So if there is something that you like that another person does, the surest way to get good at it yourself is to watch that person and copy them. This is what my father always said about a good golf swing–“watch Tiger, watch Phil”–and it’s how I personally learned to cook–“watch Alton.” The difference between this and plagiarism is, if we were to get down to it, that plagiarism is theft. But given the title of the book, we probably should dig deeper. The difference is that plagiarism doesn’t give credit, doesn’t honor the person from whom you learned. And it’s that mutual honoring–that mutual seeing and glorification of others–that both brings you into a world of shared creativity and keeps you honest and humble about your abilities. Getting over the natural imposter syndrome that comes with this, and coming to terms with the simple fact that this is what you need to learn is the first step towards a more creative life.
But this is also why sharing what you do is key. First, the obvious: it perpetuates the virtuous cycle. If you share what you do, eventually there will be people who like what you do and desire to mimic you–or at least that’s the hope! But it is more than that as well. The essential drive that Kleon points to for creativity is wonder. It is this capacity for wonder, for being caught up in the sheer grace of existence and inviting others into that wonder, that simultaneously brings meaning to life and a deep sense of community. Focusing on things that bring that sense of wonder–your passions and whims–putting your particular sheen on it, and then displaying it for the world to see and to be made better by–truly this is the goal of the creative life.
There is always the issue, a familiar trope in many coming of age tails, that an artist is never recognized in their hometown. What of Nazareth and its prophet? That Nazarene had so many things to say about this: about hiding light under a bushel, investing talents, and building larger and larger barns to hoard the harvest. To save one’s life, one must be willing to lose it.
For Kleon, much of this is dependent on the internet. The book was written in 2012; there were sunnier days on that shore then. The internet was/is the way that one escapes from the problems of locality. It is the way that you can connect with those who share your interests even when your particular Nazareth doesn’t.
The internet’s mask may be off, but this blog is started in the hope that even now it may be worth doing. After all, to steal a quote from one of my favorites: if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
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