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“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” - Steve Jobs/Picasso/Stravinsky/Eliot
by outlog 5y ago
“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
- Steve Jobs/Picasso/Stravinsky/Eliot
- awb 5y agoTo be clear, they're talking about ideas and the adaptation of those ideas, not literally stealing cash or property. “Good artists borrow [by modifying ideas], great artists steal [by copying ideas].”
- alpaca128 5y agoThe stealing part doesn't refer to directly copying ideas (I mean what great artist would do that?), more how good artists instead are able to use other works as inspiration, "make it their own" and put their spin on it.
- gowld 5y agoRight. In Jobs world, that meant stuff like taking existing Chinese tech and making it into something with worldwide wow/cool factor.
- ooer 5y agoYou got me curious. Which Chinese tech did he steal to make the iProducts with?
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Jobs world, that meant stuff like taking existing Chinese tech It was a reference to Apple apocryphally stealing "the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at [Xerox] PARC" [1]. They didn't copy an existing product. They deprived Xerox of the market into which to launch their own product. [1] https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/sites/mac/parc.html
- awb 5y agoThe way I always understood it is that good artists put their spin on it. Great artists realize perfection when they see it and just copy it, without trying to “improve” it, usually from lesser known, less successful artists so they get away with it.
- fenderbluesjr 5y agoAll great artists directly copy ideas. That is exactly what the statement implies. The point is that your own style will manifest as a mishmash of other people's ideas and this itself will constitute a new style. New ideas are just combinations of old ideas
- falcor84 5y ago</That's The Joke>
- alpaca128 5y agoThis quote doesn't have anything to do with literal theft, though: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/
- deeblering4 5y agoDepends on your outlook towards intellectual property
- alpaca128 5y agoIf the "theft" from this quote counts as IP violation then all new inventions and creations become illegal and all progress would cease. I don't think that kind of outlook makes sense.
- cm2187 5y agoAnd in my opinion this is some fuckery between consenting adults.
- jareklupinski 5y ago- jareklupinski