WEBVTT

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So there is a story about the
composer Igor Stravinsky.

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Stravinsky was about to start
a new ballet.

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But instead of starting
completely from scratch,

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he pulled out some of his
favorite classic manuscripts,

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and he got out his red pen,

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and he started correcting the scores

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as if it was his own music.

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And he borrowed baselines and melodies
from the famous works,

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but he composed his own harmonies
and rhythms underneath that work.

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And when the ballet came out,
critics were outraged.

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They said,
"How dare you do this to the classics?

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Leave the classics alone."

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Anybody knows Stravinsky's reply?

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He said, "You 'respect', but I love."

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Well, I love newspapers.
I grew up with newspapers.

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My parents subscribed to two
different newspapers.

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My father in law and my uncles
are both reporters,

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and I've been reading newspapers
my whole life.

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The trouble with newspapers
is that they're ephemeral.

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They don't last.

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When we're done reading them,
they stack up in the recycle bin.

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Despite all that, I don't know anyone
who hasn't clipped

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something out of the newspaper.

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Our impulse is to save the things
that mean something to us from oblivion.

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I think the human beings are collectors
and artists especially.

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Not hoarders, mind you,
there's a difference.

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Hoarders collect indiscriminately,
and artists collect selectively.

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They only collect the things
that they really love.

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An artist's job is to collect ideas

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and the best way
I know to collect ideas is to read.

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And what better thing to read
than a daily dispatch of human experience

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that is the daily newspaper.

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So, in 2005, I was right out of college,
right out of undergrad,

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and I had a horrible case
of writer's block.

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I would sit, I would stare
at the Microsoft Word screen,

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and that little cursor would blink at me
as if it were taunting me.

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And writing, which is once
given me great joy, it was now --

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it wasn't any fun for me anymore.

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So one day,
I was staring at that screen

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and I looked over at the recycle bin

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with that stack full of papers,
and I thought, "Here am I. Here I am,

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without any words.

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And right next to me or thousands of them,
and they've delivered

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to my doorstep everyday."

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So I thought I might steal a few,
and this is what I did:

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I picked up my marker
that I use for drawing,

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and I started making boxes
around words that popped out at me.

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And I start connecting those words
into little phrases and funny sayings.

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And when I was done, I blacked out all
the words I didn't need.

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And this is what it looks like.
It looks like as if the CIA did haiku.

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(Laughter)

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And I really wasn't sure
what I was doing.

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All I knew was that it felt really good
to watch some of those words

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disappear under that marker line.

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So what I did, was I started posting
them to my blog

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and I called them newspaper
blackout poems.

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And slowly over time,
they spread around the Internet

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and I collected them in
my first book Newspaper Blackout.

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Now, I thought I was ripping off
the Government.

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That's John Lennon's FBI file on the left
and the blackout poem on the right.

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But over time I started getting
all kinds of emails and tweets

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and other comments that my work
was completely unoriginal.

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And the artist that people pointed to
the most was this brilliant

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British artist named Tom Phillips.

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Back in the sixties Tom Phillips
walked into a bookstore,

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and he picked up the first
Victorian novel he found.

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And he went home,
and he started drawing

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and painting of the pages.

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And if you can see, he left words,
much like I do,

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he left words floating in his art pieces.
And he's done this for forty years.

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His projects called "A Humument".
And you could look it up --

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It's been a lifelong project for him.

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What I discovered about Tom Phillips
is that he actually got the idea

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for his forty-year project by reading
a Paris Review interview

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with the writer William Burroughs,

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when Burroughs was talking about
his cut-up method of writing,

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which is when you take
a piece of writing, cut it up

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and reconfigure the pieces
to make a new piece of writing.

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Funny enough, when I started
researching Burroughs,

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I found out that Burroughs got the idea

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for the cut-out technique
from his friend Brion Gysin.

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Brion Gysin was a painter at the time.
And he's preparing a canvas

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and when he was cutting the canvas,
he cut through a stack of newspapers

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and the way the newspaper strips
floated and the words worked together,

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gave him an idea of how to make poetry.

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But then, you do a little bit
more research

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and you find out that
thirty years before that

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that thirty years before that,
there was a poet named Tristan Tzara

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who in Paris, went onstage,
got a hat, got a newspaper,

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cut up the newspaper,

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put the pieces in the hat,
pulled them out one by one

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and read them as a poem.

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I traced things all the way back
to the 1760s

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where neighbor of Benjamin Franklin
named Caleb Whitford --

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in those old days,
the newspaper was fairly new

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and the columns were very skinny,

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so what Caleb did is
he read across the columns

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instead of reading them top to bottom.
And he would get all these

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funny combinations and he'd crack up
his friends in the pub.

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And eventually he published
a broadsheet of them.

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So not only was my idea completely
unoriginal,

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it turns out there was a 250 year old history
of finding poetry in the newspaper.

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So what am I supposed to do?

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Instead of getting discouraged I kept on,
because I know something

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that a lot of artists know
but few will admit to.

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And that is nothing is completely original.

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All creative work builds on
what came before.

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Every new idea is just
a remix or mash-up

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of one or two previous ideas.

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And this is a bit of what I'm talking about.
They teach you this in art school.

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Draw a line.
Draw another line next to it.

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How many lines are there?

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Well there is the first line you drew.

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And there's the second line you drew.

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But then, there's line of black space
running in between them.

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One plus one equals three.

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And speaking of lines here's an example
of what I'm talking about:

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Genetics.

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You have a mother and you have a father,
but the sum of you is greater

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than their parts.

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You are a remix or a mash-up
of your mother and your father

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and all of your ancestors.

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And just as you have a familial genealogy,


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you also have a genealogy of ideas.

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You don't get to pick your family,

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but you can pick your friends,
and you can pick the books you read,

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and you can pick the movies you see,
the music you listen to,

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the cities you live in etc.

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You are a mash-up
of what you let into your life.

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So, what I decided to do,
was I decided to take all these artists

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that came before me,
and build a kind of family tree,

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a creative lineage that I could draw from.

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And then I would add those
to the artists that I already admired

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and appreciated.

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And steal everything from them
that I possibly could.

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That's right. Steal.
I am a creative kleptomaniac.

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But unlike your regular kleptomaniac,
I'm interested in stealing the things

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that really mean something to me,

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the things that I can actually
use in my work.

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And Mr. Steve Jobs actually has
a better way of explaining it

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than I think I could.

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Steve Jobs: It comes down to try
to expose yourself

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to the best things
that humans have done.

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And then try to bring those things in
to what you're doing.

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I mean, Picasso had a saying,
he said,

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"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

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And, I've always been shameless
about stealing great ideas.

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Picasso, he said it.
Art is theft.

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One time a writer asked
the musician David Bowie

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if he thought he was original.
He said, "No, no,

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I'm more like a tasteful thief."

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And he said,
"The only art I'll actually study

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is the stuff that I can steal from.

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How does an artist look at the world?

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Well, first, she asked herself
what's worth stealing,

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and second,
she moves on to the next thing.

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That's about all there is to it.
When you look at the world this way

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there is no longer 
good art and bad art.

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There's just art worth stealing
and art that isn't.

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And everything in the world is up
for grabs.

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If you don't find something
worth stealing today,

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you might find it worth stealing tomorrow,
or the month after that

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or years later.

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T.S. Eliot said
that immature poets imitate,

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great artists, great poets steal.

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But he said,
"Bad poets take what they steel

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and they deface it.

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And the good poets turn it into
something better

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or at least something different."

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And that's really the key
to creative theft.

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Imitation is not flattery.

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So, instead of writing poetry like
William Burroughs,

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or doing colorful art pieces
like Tom Phillips,

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I decide to try to push the poems
in the my own thing

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and keep going with them.
Because I know

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that it's actually transformation
that is flattery:

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taking the things you've stolen
and turning it into your own thing.

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So today, you listen to all
these wonderful speakers

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for the past hour or so.
And what I want you to do is

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what my friend Wendy Macnaughton
the artist does,

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I want you to rip off
everyone you've met.

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All the speakers you've heard
take a nugget of something

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that resonates with you.

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The people you bump into today,
later,

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take something from them,
but bring it back to your desk.

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Bring it back to where
you do your work,

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combine it with your own ideas
and your thoughts.

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Transform it into
something completely new.

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And then put it out into the world,
so we can steal from you.

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And that's how you steal like an artist.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)