Steal Like An Artist: Austin Kleon at TEDxKC

Austin Kleon's talk "Steal Like An Artist" is a creative manifesto based on 10 things he wish he'd heard when he was starting out. He's the author of Newspaper Blackout, a best-selling book of poetry made by redacting newspaper articles with a permanent marker. Presentation of TEDxChange, part of the TEDxKC.

So there is a story about the
composer Igor Stravinsky.

Stravinsky was about to start
a new ballet.

But instead of starting
completely from scratch,

he pulled out some of his
favorite classic manuscripts,

and he got out his red pen,

and he started correcting the scores

as if it was his own music.

And he borrowed baselines and melodies
from the famous works,

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

And when the ballet came out,
critics were outraged.

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

Leave the classics alone."

Anybody knows Stravinsky's reply?

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

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

My parents subscribed to two
different newspapers.

My father in law and my uncles
are both reporters,

and I've been reading newspapers
my whole life.

The trouble with newspapers
is that they're ephemeral.

They don't last.

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

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

something out of the newspaper.

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

I think the human beings are collectors
and artists especially.

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

Hoarders collect indiscriminately,
and artists collect selectively.

They only collect the things
that they really love.

An artist's job is to collect ideas

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

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

that is the daily newspaper.

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

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

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

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

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

it wasn't any fun for me anymore.

So one day,
I was staring at that screen

and I looked over at the recycle bin

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

without any words.

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

to my doorstep everyday."

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

I picked up my marker
that I use for drawing,

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

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

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

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

(Laughter)

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

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

disappear under that marker line.

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

and I called them newspaper
blackout poems.

And slowly over time,
they spread around the Internet

and I collected them in
my first book Newspaper Blackout.

Now, I thought I was ripping off
the Government.

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

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

and other comments that my work
was completely unoriginal.

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

British artist named Tom Phillips.

Back in the sixties Tom Phillips
walked into a bookstore,

and he picked up the first
Victorian novel he found.

And he went home,
and he started drawing

and painting of the pages.

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

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

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

It's been a lifelong project for him.

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

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

with the writer William Burroughs,

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

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

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

Funny enough, when I started
researching Burroughs,

I found out that Burroughs got the idea

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

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

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

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

gave him an idea of how to make poetry.

But then, you do a little bit
more research

and you find out that
thirty years before that

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

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

cut up the newspaper,

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

and read them as a poem.

I traced things all the way back
to the 1760s

where neighbor of Benjamin Franklin
named Caleb Whitford --

in those old days,
the newspaper was fairly new

and the columns were very skinny,

so what Caleb did is
he read across the columns

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

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

And eventually he published
a broadsheet of them.

So not only was my idea completely
unoriginal,

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

So what am I supposed to do?

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

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

And that is nothing is completely original.

All creative work builds on
what came before.

Every new idea is just
a remix or mash-up

of one or two previous ideas.

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

Draw a line.
Draw another line next to it.

How many lines are there?

Well there is the first line you drew.

And there's the second line you drew.

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

One plus one equals three.

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

Genetics.

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

than their parts.

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

and all of your ancestors.

And just as you have a familial genealogy,

you also have a genealogy of ideas.

You don't get to pick your family,

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

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

the cities you live in etc.

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

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

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

a creative lineage that I could draw from.

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

and appreciated.

And steal everything from them
that I possibly could.

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

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

that really mean something to me,

the things that I can actually
use in my work.

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

than I think I could.

Steve Jobs: It comes down to try
to expose yourself

to the best things
that humans have done.

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

I mean, Picasso had a saying,
he said,

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

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

Picasso, he said it.
Art is theft.

One time a writer asked
the musician David Bowie

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

I'm more like a tasteful thief."

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

is the stuff that I can steal from.

How does an artist look at the world?

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

and second,
she moves on to the next thing.

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

there is no longer
good art and bad art.

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

And everything in the world is up
for grabs.

If you don't find something
worth stealing today,

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

or years later.

T.S. Eliot said
that immature poets imitate,

great artists, great poets steal.

But he said,
"Bad poets take what they steel

and they deface it.

And the good poets turn it into
something better

or at least something different."

And that's really the key
to creative theft.

Imitation is not flattery.

So, instead of writing poetry like
William Burroughs,

or doing colorful art pieces
like Tom Phillips,

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

and keep going with them.
Because I know

that it's actually transformation
that is flattery:

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

So today, you listen to all
these wonderful speakers

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

what my friend Wendy Macnaughton
the artist does,

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

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

that resonates with you.

The people you bump into today,
later,

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

Bring it back to where
you do your work,

combine it with your own ideas
and your thoughts.

Transform it into
something completely new.

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

And that's how you steal like an artist.

Thank you.

(Applause)