“Why Great Artists Steal” | How to Be a Better Human | TED

You're watching How to be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. And today on the show, we're talking about art and creativity. And one of the big things that I think is true about becoming an artist or making any sort of creative work is that you actually want to take from other people. You want to take inspiration from someone's style or from the way that they make work or what they make work about. You want to take all those things, steal them, put them together, blend them up, and create your own unique artistic voice. Now, that is an idea that I am stealing from the author and artist Austin Cleon. He wrote the book Steal Like an Artist, and I stole it from there. So, today on the show, what does it look like to steal like an artist? What does it mean to make work? And who gets to be an artist with Austin Cleon. Hi, I'm Austin Cleon. I call myself a writer who draws. I make uh art with words and books with pictures. Okay. So, let's start with the art that you make since um podcasting isn't traditionally a visual medium. So, can you describe for us what your art or your artistic style is? Yeah. So, I first became known for these things called newspaper blackout poems. And if you can imagine the CIA doing haik coup, that's what it looks like. So, what I do is I take an article of the New York Times and I leave just a few words behind and then I black out everything else. in it. They kind of connect into these little funny phrases or sayings. And that's what I got known for first. And that's really what um when you watch my old TED talk, that's sort of the work that led to that TED talk. I love the like heavily redacted newspaper articles instead of as like a way of protecting national security as a way of finding beauty. Um yes, it's co-opted. And you know something else that's obviously you talk about this a lot in the TED talk and in your book um steal like an artist the idea to do that is your unique idea and yet it comes from a tradition of people who've done somewhat similar things even though you didn't necessarily know that there was such a tradition when you started. So when you're a young artist and you sort of discover that the thing that you're doing is very similar to some people who have come before you. I think the only truly honorable thing to do is to locate yourself in a kind of lineage. Um, and to try to swim upstream and to say, "Okay, well, these people that I might be borrowing from either unintentionally or intentionally, where did they come from? Where did their work come from? Who are they inspired by? " And I think when you kind of swim upstream this way, you can kind of build a creative family tree. And what it does is it does a couple of things. One, it kind of gives you this whole kind of root system that you have that you can draw on and it kind of creates this like undercurrent of strong DNA, I guess, for your work. But the other thing it does is it gives you ideas for your own work cuz you can start saying, okay, that person did this. What did they not do? Like cover? Like what did these heroes of mine that came before? what did they not get to attempt and also what would happen if I got these heroes together in a room and had them collaborate. Maybe that's what my work can be. So, it's kind of a general method of studying is the more you go back, the more you know how to go forwards. There's so much that I love about that this idea that like it's not actually about being solo. It's about being a part of a community and having a like you said a lineage but also a peer group. You know, that was not original to me. That was something I stole. like that was that um the musician Brian Eno uh puts it this way. He says, "Most of the time when we talk about creative work, we talk about genius, like the individual genius, the very special, superhumanly talented individual. " You know, what we don't talk about as much is what Brian Eno calls seniors, which is the collective form of genius. You have to really understand that you're always collaborating because you're collaborating with what came before you. you're collaborating with the kind of now that will receive you. And in some ways, you could think about collaborating with the future even because when you write something, it doesn't do anything on its own. It's only when someone picks that book up and opens it that they activate whatever's inside, you know. So, creative work is always a collaboration. So, I always just um I always heir on the side of seniors and not genius. two quotes that I' that I think are related here from you is um one is an artist's job is to collect ideas and then the other is nothing is original. All creative work builds on what came before. Yeah. So let's take them out of sequence. So the first part nothing is original. That's ancient wisdom, right? That's in the Bible. There's nothing new under the sun. And actually that idea was borrowed from 2,000 years before from the Egyptians. So that's a very ancient idea. I love the idea that there's nothing new as an idea is not a new idea. That's Exactly.

idea. That's is not a new idea. Exactly. Incredible. Yeah. And neither is the idea that everything's been done. I came across this Egyptian poet from like 4,000 years ago that was complaining about how all the good words had been used. And so he was having trouble writing. So I can't make an original hieroglyph anymore, right? Like this is a 4,000 year history of writers complaining about how everything's been done. So that's like the starting point. If you say, okay, nothing is completely original. When you start from that place, then your job becomes not to just come up with great ideas, you know, out of your own noggin. It's to expand your brain out into the world and to like put your tentacles, you know, kind of out into the world and grab stuff and collect stuff and then you take it back to your workspace and you weld it into something new, as TS Elliott would say. You know, I took a class once on um screenwriting. I had a how to format a movie script. And one of the parts that we spent a lot of time on was how do you come up with an idea for a movie? And the thing that I now can't unsee is this person, this teacher was really talking about how people get so obsessed with the idea of having a completely original idea. Whereas most really successful movies are just take a an existing idea and then put it in a new place or different context. So the example they gave is like Alien is a haunted house in space. That's all you needed to do is like take a classic haunted house movie and then what if it was in space? Yeah. And that's how they pitch, you know, pitch stuff. It's this but this, right? It's Jaws in space, you it's whatever. And I think that that's where the transformation part comes in. And I think that this is another Brian Eno idea is that it's always generative to take something from one place and you just literally transport it to another place. and in doing so you transform it. The reason I really like the steel metaphor, people ask me all the time, "Oh, Austin, why you have to use the word steel? Like, isn't stealing bad and stuff? " And the reason I like the steel metaphor is that it's kind of like being a jewel thief, you know? You're like always casing the joint. Like you're always looking around for like what are the little bits and nuggets that I might be able to pick up? And I think it causes you to pay a certain kind of attention to the world because if you assume that every person you meet has some like little nugget that you could use, something that you could steal, what you do is you pay attention to them in a way that's like really fruitful. And I think that a lot of people who want to be creative, who want to make new stuff, they really need to learn to pay attention to the world. And I just think that the steel metaphor causes people to pay attention to the world in this like very specific and rich way. You obviously are really cross-disciplinary, right? You're an artist, you're a poet, you're a writer, you're an author. I think a lot of people also struggle with the question of how to self-define. And so I wonder how do you think about that? Is that something we should even do? I've gotten to this place where I have started thinking that nouns are more deleerous than verbs in the sense that I think that if you forget about whatever noun you're trying to be and you just focus on the verbs, the verbs will take you further. I'll be very concrete here. I meet a lot of people who want to be a writer, right? Like I'd love to be a writer. Oh, but that writing part, oh, I don't know about the writing part, you know? They would love to have like the noun, right? They'd love to be the writer and like all their ideas about like what goes into that. But the actual verb, the actual thing that you do, that's the thing you have to worry about. And I think that, you know, job titles, that's for other people, you know, like if you just consider yourself a novelist, well, what happens when you have a really good idea for a screenplay? You know, if you're only a stand-up comedian, what happens when you want to do a podcast, right? So if you focus on the verbs that you like to do and what kind of activates your creative mind, that's just way more fruitful than whatever the noun is that you want to be. There can be a really high mental bar to think about like, well, what would it mean if I was a writer or if I was an artist? But often there's a much lower internal bar to what would it mean to write something today? draw something today? Right? I wouldn't have to be a capital A artist to take out a pen and sketch something on this piece of paper. It can be bad. I'm still drawing something. Yeah. So, the book I'm working on right now that'll come out next year is called Don't Call It Art. The book is inspired by my kids when they were little. And um there's something the artist John Baldesari said. He said, you know, I learned so much from watching little kids draw. Kids don't call it art when they're throwing stuff around. They're just making stuff. And I think that when it comes to making stuff, if you could just forget about art, you know, again

forget about that noun, forget about making art and you just focus on like what are the things that you do? Like we're going to draw a picture and we're going to see what happens. We're going to get on stage and and tell some jokes. And I think that's like that was the major thing that my kids gave me. It was just like if you're not worried about the product and you're just focused on the process, just how good it feels to be scribbling That's something else that I wanted to talk to you about because I notice that you often write about and describe how your family and your kids are part of your creative life. They're not a separate thing. Yeah. And I I'm wondering how do you think about that balance between family and inspiration and work? I don't think of balance at all and I don't think about separating. I see everything as just a big stew pot. I got really lucky early on. I had a couple of people I looked up to when I was younger that were very involved parents and also brilliant artists. There's a serial connelly line where he says the enemy of art is the pram in the hall. So the stroller in the hall is the enemy of art. on the whole like mothers do so much more labor that studying artist mothers ended up being a way more fruitful thing for me as a dad cuz it just gave me a higher bar to try to you know live up to. Um, but yeah, for me the kids, I mean, a fouryear-old, if you are feeling stuck creatively, a four, just borrow a four-year-old for an afternoon and you will see the world the way an artist sees it because everything is new to a four-year-old. They haven't seen this stuff before and they've just acquired language and so they have all sorts of crazy they're poets really. They're like ecstatic poets. I used to just like scribble things that my kids were babbling, you know, cuz they're just so they're so tapped into the world in that kind of psychedelic artist way where they see the world with fresh eyes. And the reason they see them with fresh eyes is they've just never seen this stuff before. Especially thinking about, right, like an artist's job is to collect ideas. You are able to get new ideas from being a parent because you're seeing the same old stuff, the same mundane things, but through this completely different lens where all of a sudden like the idea of a lawn isn't just, oh yeah, everyone has a lawn. It's like it's grass and you could do this with the grass. And did you know that if you dig there's like a worm down here and what's a worm? It's great that you mentioned grass because and lawns because that's what Walt Whitmann is doing in the first, you know, poem in Leaves of Grass is he's literally looking at a grass and like talking to a kid about it. So, it's like that's like that's what a poet does. A poet looks at the ordinary and pays really close attention to it and then the ordinary plus extra attention equals the extraordinary. But like yeah, with the kids I was like, these people are going to be my teachers. I'm gonna make these little beginners my teachers was kind of my idea. I just like sort of started out with this idea that they would have way more to teach me than I would have to teach them. And that's what it turned out to be. And like that that's where the whole idea from this next book came is that I just was like what happens when you're the studio assistant to these little pint-sized Picassos, you know, cuz my four-year-olds drew like every artist dreams of, you know, they would just go at it, look at it, ah, yeah, great. And throw it over their shoulder and start over. It's just the most magical way of drawing. Just the way every artist would love to make work. you know, this idea that a lot of parenting I think can be viewed as like uh mistakes and messes and that if you look at it in a different way. Um, you know, you gave this example of like your kids I think it was your couch but like they drew in permanent marker on your couch and all of a sudden you're like this is a masterpiece. My son Jules just got really into drawing skeletons and he drew a couple of skeletons on the couch cushions of the outdoor couch and I posted it and said, "Well, sometimes we go overboard. " And my friend said, "What if you embroidered it? " And so my wife actually embroidered over the drawings for the couch cushions. And so it became this whole thing. We often think that we take care of things because we love them. But actually, it's just as true that we love things and that they're meaningful to us because we take care of them. that putting in the work builds the relationship. It's not necessarily just one way or the other. Yeah, this is a beautiful idea that I think my friend Rob Walker first turned me on. Uh he has a book uh called the um the art of noticing. And in that book, he has a an assignment he gives his students where the assignment is to care for something. And so you have to care for something for a week. And um I think that he got this idea from a student of his who took care of a plant

for a week. and he was like all of a sudden I love plants you know cuz I spent time like caring for this plant you know I see everything as connected and so it's like that with your art if you are feeling uninspired and even if you hate your work there's something about just showing up and going through the motions is a very underrated phrase because that's what you do when you're a creative person and I think that's the big misunderstanding with creative work is so many People think you have the idea and then you just have to figure out how to express it. And I find that it's really in the work. It's like writing is not about having an idea and then expressing it. Writing is about figuring out what you think. Like figuring out what is going on inside you and what you really think. You don't know it until you see it on the page. I think that the one of the biggest misconceptions that I had and that I still try and fight against is this idea that what I'm going for is something perfect. Like if only I could write a perfect book or craft a perfect joke or have a post online that every person who saw it would have to say, "Well, that is perfect. " Like that is something that I kind of think is my goal. But then in practice, the things that I feel the most are the most meaningful to me, the things that I feel the most connected to are the ones that are like obviously broken and I found ways to fix and take care of. Right. Yeah. And I think it's really important to think about some of the art that you love or the people you look up to and why is it that we're so attracted to things that are imperfect in other people's work and then we don't let it into our own work. And I think that sometimes when things are imperfect, it lets us into the work a little bit. You know, if something's totally perfect, it's like, well, who would want to enter this thing and enter into a conversation with it? But if things are like just slightly off, then it like kind of brings us in. Like I think the Japanese are a lot better at that than us, you know? I think like there the idea of wobbishabi is like good like find things that are like that have a, you know, like a little bit of scratches and it's been worn in. I love the art of kinsugi, which is when you like break a pot and you use like golden glue to put it together and they don't try to hide the seams, they actually bring them out. But um I think there's a lot to be learned from that tradition of imperfection. That's what punk rock did for me when I discovered punk rock or you know some of the real like rougher indie filmmakers like Jim Jarmish or something like that. like that that's that kind of stuff like really spoke to me as a kid cuz it was like I think it was uh Bernard Sumner of New Order. He's like, "Yeah, I saw the Sex Pistols on stage. They were terrible. I wanted to get up on stage and be terrible with them. " It's like that you see imperfection in someone else. You're like, I want to do that. My version of this is improv comedy. If it's a really good scene, it means that like people are having so much fun that they're like, I wish I could get up there and like be in that scene. It's so funny. I wish I was part of that. And the thing that I think I've loved the most about performing comedy of that kind with other people is that you're not trying to avoid the mistake. You're trying to look at the mistake and pounce on it and use it as a gift. Like yes. Oh, what a fun that is to be like, "Okay, if you don't stumble over your words at all and you don't say anything weird, we're going to be high and dry up, right? " Someone needs to do something weird unintentionally so then we can take that path and make it look good like it wasn't a mistake at all. Well, you know, like I live in a city where it's like keep Austin weird is like the awful slogan we've had for so long. And I've been modifying it myself lately. I've been like be the weird you wish to see in the world, right? And I think about that a lot. And that's kind of what you're talking about on stage. You want something weird to happen. You want a mistake just enough to make it interesting, right? And that's what we're wanting. We want to mess up just enough to make things interesting and give us something to work with, you know? So there's these artistic ways that you can put this into practice. Even if you're not, you know, if you have a totally boring, random job that you don't particularly care about, you can still have these creative and artistic outlets in other parts of your life, too. Oh, absolutely. One of the primary things I tell people is to get a hobby. Uh, I think hobbies are just so underrated in this culture because we're this culture of like time is money and then if you do get a hobby, you're supposed to professionalize immediately. Like I love riding bikes and people say, "Oh, you're a cyclist. " I say, "No, no, no, no. I'm not a cyclist. I like to ride a bicycle, you know? I don't have a bunch of gear. It's not about like, you know, optimizing my speed and all that stuff. I like to ride bikes. I like to be an amateur. It's the love of it. You know, I've learned now that actually like the best way to crack that problem if you're struggling with a creative problem or you can't quite figure out how something works isn't to just like keep, you know, trying to scratch through the concrete wall. To just like do it like that is to go, okay, I'm going to let that cook on the

back burner and I'm going to go do something fun. play with my kid and we're going to take a bike ride or I'm going to go to the pool do something that's just like totally random. And then when I come back, I'm like, "Oh, it was actually working back there. I got a lot more brain than I'm conscious of. Well, we talked about collaboration earlier and one of the things that you're always collaborating with is time. Time is really a resource that people don't utilize enough. The power of a good night's sleep or just a 15minute break. Just that time travel of becoming someone else and coming back to your problem. So now I'm seeing this thing through a different lens. So yeah, you're absolutely right. It's like people think if I just sit here and I pound and I pound and I like drill through I'll get to this thing and it's like no the more you like you put your time in and then you say okay I'm going to walk away and then you come back you go away so you can come back right there's like a really lot of um examples and a depth of research showing that for creative work that the kind of the maximum that almost anyone can do is three to four hours of creative work in a day which is not to say you don't do more work in a day. It's just not creative work in Right. the really intense like p like really intense creative stuff. Yeah. I don't have more than three or four hours in me. How do you think about that? Like committing your future self to doing something versus leaving yourself this wide open space to kind of do whatever and have it come up. How do you balance those two pieces? Because you obviously need a little bit of both. Oh, well that's I love that you said how do you leave this wide open space because that to me is the spontaneity is the kind of like you have the like um you know you have the date you have the you know what you're going to do. You're going to write a newsletter but what's going to go into it? And that's like the spontaneous part. those blackout poems we talked about, when I was making one of those, two or three, four or five of those every day, I knew I was going to sit down and try to make a poem, but I didn't know what it was going to be. And that was the I knew I was going to sit down and work, but I didn't know what was going to happen. And I think that's like the magic thing that creative people have to get hooked on. You into the kind of like what's going to happen part of it, right? like to be really orderly, to schedule your work, to like show up like it's a job, but then to get hooked into that magic of like what's going to happen this time. I love that. That really resonates for me. People ask me like, "What's your schedule? " And I'm like, "Well, I know what I'm going to do on Monday and Thursday. " Everything else is like, "Who knows? " Like, we don't know what's going to happen. If I scheduled every portion of my day and my week for something, that would not create the space for new things to fill it and to happen. You know, I think the tension is kind of an interesting idea in creative work. I I'm a person who thinks that there's a proper tension between opposites in creative work and that actually the energy for someone's work is found in that. So, let me give you one of my tensions, which is I find myself to be a deeply lazy person. I know we're not supposed to use that word anymore, like laziness doesn't exist or whatever. It's, you know, but I'm lazy. Like, I'm a lazy person. Like, left to my own defenses, I would sit around and do nothing. Like, really, I love to lay around and do nothing. But I'm an intensely disciplined person. And by discipline I mean uh I take Robert Frip's definition of def of discipline which is making a commitment in time. I know that if I show up in a certain way over time I will get the things that I want. And so I use my intense discipline to balance out my laziness. But if I was just disciplined I don't know that I would come up with the same work. You know, because it's like there's something about that tension between my deep longing to do nothing and to be extremely disciplined. Something arises out of that, right? And I think you can find these opposites and these tensions in your work. And I think that like this happens a lot in the creative life. I could just be giving away the fact that I'm a Gemini if that means anything to people who are listening. But I've had these tensions. I have these opposites that pull at me as a creative person. Pictures and words would be another one. You know, I have this deep, you know, this deep longing to like make things out of language and to move, you know, activate that part of my brain, but I also have this nonverbal part of my brain that just wants to make pictures. You know, I'm a fairly mediocre writer. Like, I'm like, okay, I'm a perfectly mediocre like artist, but when you put the two together, I become pretty good

right? And so it's like the tension between those two. So if a guitar string is too slack, it just buzzes. It doesn't make any sound. But if you ratchet it up too tight, it's going to snap. The music comes from the proper tension between the two like poles that the guitar strings on. So I think in a lot of creative life, people look at ways like, man, I just like I got to chill out and like minimize my tension, you know? And I'm like, no, you need to find the proper tension. like the right tension that makes your work sing. And I think a lot of that is identifying the opposing forces within you and like trying to wrangle some sort of like proper tension so you can get like the music. I love that. I think the guitar string metaphor is so good and it really is. I've never heard anyone put it that way, but it really resonates with me. Um resonates, pun intended. Very good. Thank you so much. Steal like an artist. We've talked about keep going and show your work. Keep going is about making art in chaotic times and show your work is about how to put your work out there publicly. The thing that is my personal challenge that I really struggle with and maybe it's just an emotional thing is when I combine those two. making art in chaotic times and then putting it out because I get so self-conscious about putting things out there that are not directly improving the world at a time when it feels like the world so desperately needs to be improved. That's often the barrier where I go like I can't post about this. I can't send an email about my little comedy show or send them, you know, hey, listen to this great conversation when it's like it just feels like it's such a dire time and it's kind of always a dire time in some way. So, how do you think about that for yourself or for how should I think about it is really a selfish question. Yeah. So, here's what I think about art. I have friends who think that art can save the world and I don't think art saves the world at all. I think that art is trying to throw art at the world is like Kurt Vonagget said it's like attacking a knight in armor with a hot fudge sundae, you know, like I don't actually think art saves the world. I think it saves lives. Like individual people. And if you do that enough, you save the world in like tiny ways. And so when I think about like my own work, I'm thinking about just reaching one reader. If I can like if I can just like make one reader's day better, maybe they carry a little bit of something into their day and if I can reach like enough people and I can kind of improve their day and I can stand up for the things that I think are worth saving in the culture because I think in some ways just being a person that's curious, who pays attention, who spends time making things, these are things that are rapidly leaving our culture like it's just like going away. If you can be a person who models that kind of thing, you're already like making a dent in things. You know, I always think about being that kid, you know, being 15 and growing up in the middle of a cornfield and how much that music, how much that comedy, how much that, you know, those movies meant to me, but also how that stuff activated a spirit in me that then, you know, made me look at the world a little bit different. So, I think that like I'm not sure that art changes the world, but I think it changes people. And I think that's slowly, you know, it affects change. Everybody needs to discover their gift, like what you've been put here to do, you know, like I'm not really an activist. Like I'm not very good at that, but I can show up and show people what it's like to think and pay attention and to, you know, have a spine as far as your own point of view goes. And so I think that if everybody right now would show up and do what they know how to do, like I think things would be better immediately. Actually, whatever you've devoted your life to, if it was worth doing 6 months ago, I think it's worth doing now. You know, you just got to show up and do what you know how to do. I struggle with how do I do something that is gonna, you know, when there's only a limited amount of time in my day and in my week and uh how do I do something that's not going to make any money and potentially be humiliating and feel really bad and yet I know that is the path towards new exciting ways of self-expression is to be humiliated and be terrible at something for a long time potentially. I think about someone like Chris Rock who, you know, when he works up one of those specials, he gets into a club and there's no phones and he knows it's going to be bad and it's just like it's in private, not doing things publicly. I think you have to

find some sort of wood shetty kind of like private place where you could put yourself in that kind of beginner's mind, throw stuff at the wall and see what happens type thing. And so I think that's why side projects and hobbies and stuff like that, putting yourself in a place where you can, you know, have a sort of safe failure, you know, because when you're starting out, you got nothing to lose. You'll do anything, right? You know, I mean, like even a book like Steal Like an Artist, people are like, "How'd you write this book? " I'm like, "I didn't know you couldn't do things. " Citizen Canain is a perfect example. Orton Wells, this is in the new book. the um Orson Wells said that you know how did we do Citizen Kane and he said ignorance like sheer ignorance I didn't know what wasn't possible and that made it possible there's a great story in um the element the Ken Robinson the late this is a great talk about the TED talk right Ken Robinson the TED talk where he says you know little girls you know drawing in a class and the teach you know the classroom teacher says what are you drawing and she says I'm drawing a picture of God And the classroom teacher says, "Well, nobody knows what God looks like. " And she says, "They will in a minute, you know, and it's like, but I think that's like with the kids, that was something that really helped is like what happens when we just sit here and draw something that we know we're just going to toss in the recycle bin afterwards? " Like what, you know, what what happens when we know, you know, we make something that we know is not getting recorded. we make something we know we're going to burn later. That kind of thing. You know, you're just trying to like put yourself in that position where you got nothing to lose. That's why I like writing a diary, you know, cuz I can like I mean like these old basic things like my diary, I can whine and say awful things that, you know, that I would never want to say publicly. But yeah, it's just like not having anything to lose again, you know? How do you do it? I don't know. It's hard for me, too. Thank you so much for being on the show. This was such a pleasure. I really I'm so excited. Thank you, Chris. This was great. I really had a lot of fun.