'Great Artists Steal'

Ran across this the other day, in a written article from the BBC:

"Artists have always learned from and been influenced by others—'great artists steal' as the saying goes...."

Hmm, 'great artists steal' again. Here's a section from a blog post I wrote in 2016 about artists borrowing ideas that concentrated on Steve McCurry and Julie Blackmon among others:

The Internet is not good for chasing down real quotes. A couple of times in the comments to the Julie Blackmon post people brought up the aphorism "good artists borrow, great artists steal," which is a fake quotation that can be found in innumerable variations attributed to a variety of sources. Most are debased Bowdlerizations out of context of a quote by T.S. Eliot, the American-born British poet who was one of the great literary artists of the 20th century and arguably the last poet who was a household name.

The real quotation is, in fact, helpful when considering Julie Blackmon's influences. It occurs in Eliot's 1920 book of essays Sacred Wood, in his essay on the English dramatist Philip Massinger (1583–1640). Here's the full essay, and here's the relevant passage:

"...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. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal."

Although the fake quotation is almost always used to justify theft, Eliot's essay if anything is a defense of transformative re-use, which is not only allowed under copyright law but is sanctioned by long practice and artistic convention (even if the borderline cases have often been uncomfortable). The specific elements in Julie Blackmon's pictures that are "lifted" from the Balthus paintings are, in fact, stolen elements, but she is not appropriating his ideas. Rather, she's deliberately "quoting" him, as a jazz musician is said to "quote" a different song by inserting a few bars of it into a different composition or jam, and as a modern electronic musician (I know it's quaint to call them that, but I don't want to call out a single genre) uses samples. The intent is not to "lean on" the antecedent as a crutch, using it to supply any deficiency in her own inventiveness, but to delight those who are familiar with the original...she's playing off it, as it were. Adding another dimension to her work. The readers who called it "riffing" got it right, I think.

You can't stop fake news; you can't correct bad memes; in the age of social media, every lie becomes a Big Lie.  The skill urgently needed in the moment, "evaluation of competing claims," is one we haven't yet learned to value. In the new context we need to learn to approach everything with wariness. Skepticism, as the common adjective applied to it cheerfully tells us, is healthy. Just because mistakes and lies can no longer be defeated, however, doesn't mean the truth is not still out there, and still true: T.S. Eliot did not say that "great artists steal." That's a "truthiness" invented and imposed by the Internet, first by simpleminded reduction, then by stupid, blunt assertion, then by repetition. Not just a misunderstanding, but a mistake.

Except of course that the BBC writer did not even bring Eliot into it! It's merely labeled "the saying." He or she probably doesn't know where the saying comes from, or the reason it was said, never mind who said it. 

But let's get one thing very clear. Folk-slash-Internet wisdom is wrong on this one not just because the originator of the quotation is misrepresented, but because great artists don't steal. Great art is original; sui generis; derived but not derivative; inventive—and yes, perhaps sometimes incorporates repurposed elements, knowingly. Great artists don't steal. Mediocre, average, everyday artists steal. Great art, following the noble dictum of Eliot's compagno Ezra Pound, is made new. And, surprisingly often, stays that way.

Mike

Comments

[Bill Tyler]

About stealing - reminds me of Tom Lehrer's ode to plagiarism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL4vWJbwmqM. (Note to non-mathematicians, the song makes more sense if you know that Lobachevsky was a prominent 19th century Russian mathematician.)