[Off-Topic] Great Artists Steal

Most of us geeks have probably heard the phrase:

“Good artists copy, great artists steal”

It reaches us through Steve Jobs, in the context of the graphical interface being copied first by Apple from Xerox and then by Microsoft from Apple.

The phrase became something of a cult after the famous TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley. And for a lot of people it ended up wrongly tied to “plagiarism” and “piracy.” For a long time I never stopped to think about it myself, I just tossed it into that same bucket.

The phrase is usually credited to the great artist Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, or simply Pablo Picasso :-). One aside, though: that attribution is shaky. The earliest documented version of the idea comes from T.S. Eliot, in 1920 (“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”), and it was Steve Jobs himself who started pinning Picasso’s name on the saying back in the 1980s. Either way, it’s the Picasso version that stuck, and that’s the one I’m starting from here.

Those who’ve followed me for a while and attend my talks know I spend a lot of time trying to explain the term “artist” applied to “software developer,” to “software craftsmanship,” and more specifically to the “practice of programming.”

Programming isn’t something where you read a book, do an exercise once, and “boom,” you already know how to program. Like any art, whether painting, music, or dance, it takes discipline and a lot of practice. And anyone who devotes themselves to an art knows that repetition is a technique, but repeating the same thing gets you nowhere.

The “practice” process starts with mastering a technique, repeating it many times, figuring out where you’re going wrong, and refining it. Once it’s mastered, you move quickly to new and harder techniques. It’s continuous, with no “end.” There’s no “arrival point” for anyone who practices an art. Even martial artists know a black belt doesn’t mean “the end.”

If I had to sum all of that up, it would be with Picasso’s phrase:

“Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal Take For Themselves”

I swapped “steal” for the more literal “take for themselves.” That’s the gotcha that changes the meaning for me.

Everything we have today, knowledge, culture, technique, technology, comes from centuries of meticulous accumulation and careful refinement by hundreds of great men and women. Literally, we are small elves standing on the shoulders of giants.

A material property, something physical, when taken from someone, is theft: for you to have it, someone had to go without. Copying that property is plagiarism. With knowledge and ideas, though, “copying” or “stealing” takes on several more abstract meanings, and I want to lay out one of them here.

Any artist has to start somewhere. A contemporary painter already starts light-years ahead of colleagues from a few centuries back. Back then, access to paint wasn’t obvious.

From what material in nature do you extract yellow? Maybe from egg yolk. And ultramarine blue? Things get complicated. Years of accumulated knowledge today hand us every possible shade without our having to think about it.

The same goes for pointillism, watercolor, oil paint. Today we don’t need to “discover” these techniques, they’re already exhaustively documented. In other words:

“To become ‘good’ artists, we must ‘copy’ the hundreds of techniques the giants created before us, until we master them.”

And let’s be honest: a painter who copies the techniques well enough to be indistinguishable from the masters who created them is already an excellent artist.

Every practice starts by copying what has already been done. Repeating, learning the nuances, understanding why the techniques ended up the way they are today. Whoever follows this philosophy, copying to master and pushing forward until they cover the whole field, is walking in the footsteps of the giants of the past.

Then comes an extra step. We geeks know the cliché of when “the disciple becomes the master.” In the movies it looks much easier, but that step is the moment the artist stops merely copying what they mastered:

“To become ‘great’ artists, after mastering what we copied, we can adapt it, refine it, and who knows, improve it or innovate on it. That’s when we stop just copying and start literally ‘stealing,’ making that property effectively our own, taking it for ourselves.”

That’s when an Einstein succeeds a Newton, or a Plato succeeds a Socrates. Here “steal” carries the sense of “making the property effectively your own,” far from the common use of “undeservedly taking what belongs to someone else.”

Every good painter or visual artist has dozens of giants and centuries of material to “copy” and “practice”: Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Picasso.

Wall Painter vs Painting Painter

Another thing I’ve been repeating ad nauseam is that there are programmer-coders and programmer-developers. Wall painters and painting painters.

Coders don’t understand their role in this story. They learn to copy a few techniques, maybe master some of them, and quickly call themselves “masters.” It’s mediocre thinking, the kind that would embarrass the giants of earlier eras: Babbage, Von Neumann, Bob Noyce. They’re mere wall painters.

Developers, as I like to call them, understand their role in history better. They recognize the richness of the material that already exists, practice without limit and without believing in an end, and master technique after technique, always aiming a level above what exists now. But they’d never put themselves in the position of painting a Mona Lisa without first perfecting the sfumato. Those are painting painters.

It embarrasses me to see programmers who read little, practiced miserably little, and think themselves in a master’s position. The same way it would embarrass a painter to hear someone claim they can paint a fresco without even knowing how to thin a plaster base.

To sum up my personal version:

“Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Take For Themselves, Terrible Artists Are Full of Themselves.”