Stop Stealing Like an Artist
You are not a thief. You are participating in an artistic tradition.
There's a very popular book out there that gets recommended to artists all the time called Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon.
I am not here to take issue with the content of Kleon’s book, which consists mostly of simple, encouraging advice to people looking to develop their own voice packaged in an approachable manner. I do take issue with that titular phrase Steal Like an Artist. What is this idea that artists always steal?
We can understand the undercurrents of this thinking. We can look at many films and say, if we know our film history, that they are — here is the problem — what word to say — inspired by, influenced by, or rip offs of previous works?
We can recollect the mid-2010s phenomena of hyper-intelligent bad guys confronting the hero from behind glass prisons or steel cages, only to escape in the following scene, revealing that they had planned to be captured all along. This phenomenon appears right after the Heath Ledger Joker, who cast a long shadow over what we might call the cinematic tradition. Even up to the latest Batman of 2022 we can still see the proclivity towards hyper-intelligent villains who have planned out every iota of their scheme like an inverted Sherlock Holmes. This was the original appeal of the 2008 Joker, and with such a powerful idea that we've had to repeat it many times over in a different context. It is like how after The Matrix films, every action film needed to have the hero get surrounded by a circle of bad guys and then proceed to have a highly choreographed martial arts fight, one against ten. Once again, it’s easy to trace the roots of this standoff to earlier sources – Hong Kong action cinema, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and perhaps even earlier, to samurai films going all the way back to the 30s.
Nowadays things are more chaotic. You might still see a hero facing off against numerous baddies, but the stand off gets less emphasized; that perfect half circle forming around an emotionless hero, fists beginning to clench, is a thing of the past. Neo in the Merovingian’s Castle gets replaced by John Wick, Gun-Fuing his way through a night club.
Now the reader may be tempted to say, “does this not just prove Austin's point? Artists steal. It's just a fact of life, what's the problem? Get over it.” My problem is with the word itself.
Steal. We mustn’t dilute the power of that word. It makes for a punchy title that will sell many books, but the robbery here is the meaning of the word. In every other case this word puts in mind a very negative image of a thief. Of course this kind of stealing does indeed happen in art, and we have the formal word for this: plagiarism, and it puts an icky feeling in our gut when we imagine it, or imagine that we could be tempted to do it, but it is quite important to distinguish between stealing of this kind and what we have been discussing so far.
If we fail to do so we will have a very cynical view of all artistic processes. All art is stealing, it’s just theft all the way down. Really? Did Renaissance artists sack Rome again in the Late Middle Ages? Was the Parthenon stripped of its treasures once more in 1300? The propagation of this view is exactly what I think is happening. It is yet another example of the stripping away and separating out of culture into lonely individuals. Those who have “stolen” look at their contemporaries and see nothing other than bands of thieves who have chosen their favorite mark. The artist as a post-apocalyptic raider that rapes, and pillages and plunders the annals of history in order to survive. Sadly, this image is implicit in this paradoxically celebratory statement, “Steal like an Artist.”
We would never say that someone who makes a train robbery scene in a film is merely ripping off the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery. When one robs trains, one fires revolvers, it's quite simple. Just because it happened first in The Great Train Robbery doesn’t mean it can never happen again without theft. Well, not artistic theft, we are talking about a train robbery after all.
When in space, airlocks are problems. It's always the case. It doesn't mean Gravity, Sunshine, and Interstellar are all ripping off 2001: A Space Odyssey if they have a scene where an airlock plays a pivotal role. Like the robber and the gun on the train, the airlock is a place of inherent tension where there is possibility for catastrophe. When you’re making a film about space travel, you’re going to exploit that tension. In response to this idea of stealing we’ve stumbled into describing something that we already know about, we call it genre.
Whether it be superheroes, westerns, space fantasies, time thrillers, crime thrillers, or slasher films, genres have conventions. They have normative expectations that they assert upon filmmakers and on audiences. This is helpful, it makes stories coherent and helps audiences participate in what they are seeing. There is a dance between staying too close to the conventions and going out too far. This is the same tension that we've described elsewhere as between the public and the private vision of an artist. We call expectations in genre that have grown stale tropes or cliches. This means that these ideas are ready to be recycled, taken out of the loop for a while, or given a new spin.
It's natural that new ideas come and go out of the genre, like the one against ten stand-off. There are expectations in modern films that were not there previously, or vice versa. Independent minded "artistic filmmakers” often disdain genre and feel limited by its depersonalizing effects on their expression. They like to raise their fists at it to try to “subvert expectations.” There is certainly a recent phenomenon of filmmakers who seem to hate the very things they are making. All of this is connected to the artist as the thief, who wishes he was not a petty criminal, but a Robin Hood. A solitary, individual folk hero who steals the ideas of the rich, successful story tellers of old, and transforms them into transcendent journeys of self- expression, that shall end in their personal deification by an admiring audience.
The success and long-lasting appeal of genre, and conversely negative reaction of fans, angered at overly individualistic expression in blockbuster filmmaking, shatter this myth. In the wreckage, the filmmaker realizes that the audience cares less about the individual expression of the artist and more about the satisfaction of the genre. Many a casual film fan is not an expert in the language and grammar of cinematic technique but is a folk expert in the grammar of genre. It is this deep familiarity with the genre of choice that leads many a film goer to watch a crummy movie and say, “I could have done better.” In fact, the audience is often more sophisticated and more in tune to these nuances of expectation than the director, who has so many other concerns that the audience cannot possibly conceive of, that might cause him to overlook what is obvious to the viewer.
But genre is a low word, with a hint of derision in it, and there is a requisite ignominy of being called a “genre filmmaker.” Let us not ask more from this word than it can bear, and that is why I called this passing on of style from film to film a cinematic tradition. Perhaps tradition is a word with its own baggage of stuffiness and dogma, but it is still the best word we have for what we are discussing.
Once we realize that we are not thieves who can steal ideas that are floating out there and subsume them into our identities, we will understand that we are purveyors of an artistic tradition that lives and breathes through us. We are participants in our culture, who give form and expression to the ideas and insecurities of our time that would otherwise loom in darkness, gnawing away at the unconscious. We are the articulators of public myth, giving expression to the values that hold our societies together. We do this most successfully through forms and patterns that can be recognized and fully comprehended by the public.
Of course we filmmakers are influenced by the leaders in our field, Nolan, Spielberg, other luminaries, past and present, near and far, lauded and obscure, but one cannot succeed in stealing from these figures of such public renown, no more than a Florentine sculptor from Michelangelo. Rather he can do nothing at the foot of these statues if not be inspired and to see new means by which to bring stone to life. This is not stealing, not unless he raids the workshop of his elder and by night, rips off the dust covers of unfinished work and under crack of thunder cloud, carves his name into already polished rock. If he does this, then that man is a thief and deserving of all the ignominy that he shall receive. In every other case, that man is a bearer of a tradition, who carries forth the best that came before him.
Yes, it is incumbent upon the younger artist to bring new expression and new life to old forms, not to blandly recapitulate them, but these old forms are the foundations of the new structure, plain for all to see, not secret formulas locked away in vaults. But the visiting sculptor who comes to admire the chisel work a dead master must never forget that the locals who live in the shadow of the statue in the square know it better than he, and know not the chisel marks, but the name, the meaning of the figure, and the reason for subtlety of its smile.