I have a cousin who’s in high school and he told me he has a friend who makes music. One song he made went viral and has over 45 million play counts on Spotify— far more than his other songs, each averaging less than 1 million.
When my cousin told me about his friend’s hit song, I wanted to give it a listen. I listened to it and the rhythm sounded very similar to another song that I enjoyed; I played that song right after and it’s extremely similar to the friend’s song. It’s likely that my favorite song was the influence for his hit song. And if that’s the case, can we say that the song was copied or heavily influenced?
There’s a secret in the artist’s world that helps them unlock their creativity, and Pablo Picasso defined it perfectly:
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
Pablo Picasso
Yet, even this quote was stolen from the past, because T.S. Eliot also wrote something very similar:
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.
T.S. Eliot
And perhaps even T.S. Eliot stole the quote from a lesser-known poet. Who are we to determine? And does it even matter?
The notion that artists must be original is a myth. An artist will struggle creating if all they ever think about is creating something ‘original,’ never realizing their maximum potential because of one false belief. The struggling artist suffers because of such naiveté. The successful artist understands that great art is stolen, that to create an original piece is to consolidate multiple pieces; that inspiration is what comes when the artists sees everything as stealable.
Kanye West stole what he thought was stealable and put his twist on it, creating albums like College Dropout and Graduation. Shakespeare stole from historical texts and classical sources to create his famous plays— even Romeo and Juliet was based on an earlier Italian tale.
But the reason we call them geniuses and not frauds is because they adapted their inspirations into their own works; we see their works and identify it as originals because they made their inspirations something better, or at least something different.
To see the world as stealable is to take inspiration from everyone and everything. Regardless of the medium, the artist sees value in everything, and must be selective in what he finds for his work. There’s more value in things others overlooked, but it depends on how the artists uses what he finds.
Everyone can become an artist, but not everyone can become a great artist. If you want to become a great artist, you must look for things to steal and make them your own. A great artist steals what they find and turns it into something better, something original. The difference between the struggling artist and the successful artist is that the struggling artist wants to call his work original; the successful artist knows his work is not original, but makes it so and leaves it to the interpretation of his audience.
As for my cousin’s friend, it’s up to his audience to interpret his song as a copy or as an original, one being more beneficial than the other.
Here’s my inspiration for the day.