A fortunate piece of serendipity during our recent trip to London was my discovery in the shop attached to the National Gallery of a little book by the American writer Austin Kleon, entitled Steal like an artist. Not surprisingly I couldn’t resist taking a look at a book with a title like that, but I bought it and read it on the train coming home (between finishing the Guardian crossword!) Despite its jokey title and presentation it is really worth reading, partly because it served to crystallise and put into pithy prose a lot of the things I have been thinking about artistic creativity, and the experience of being an artist.
Kleon reenforced my own doubts about the over-emphasis that is often given to originality–which can be a cover and a justification for activities which, although different are not in any way interestingly let alone significantly different. (See my recent post about Maurizio Cattelan.)* The argument of Kleon’s book is that all art necessarily depends upon and refers to, in one way or another, its predecessors, so that our primary concern should be with being ourselves rather than with being “original”. Probably more valuable to me than this, in some respects, were his suggestions about the positive value to one’s creative life of activities we might consider to be peripheral or tangential to our serious artistic intentions, and the central importance of sharing our work with other people.
His book has been very encouraging in several ways, because my previous tendency to assume that I have been doing everything wrong was challenged, and I realise now just how much I have been doing right. There are things I want to change, but now I have some idea why that should be so.
The sense of reenforcement with which Steal like an artist left me continued this afternoon when I met a couple of friends to look at my current exhibition entitled Creating the Creation. It is really good when you encounter people with whom the penny has dropped, and who are able to relate to your art in an intelligent and sympathetic manner.
*See my blog entry entitled Does art deserve political attention? (12/12/19).