Bad artists copy

“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.”

Quick. Who said this? Ah, of course, Picasso. Or was it?

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

That one’s from TS Elliot. Ok, so they both said. it. Wait a minute… what’s this?

“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”

Damn. This one comes from Stravinsky.

This is just from ten minutes of googling. It is likely that this quote can be traced not only to many contemporary artists, but also to many before them. There are many deep, interesting, worthwhile ideas in the world, but the world has existed for a long time, and mankind has been thinking up ideas for well neigh on ten thousand years. Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine author who wrote many interesting, mind-bending short stories. He was also the Head Librarian in Buenos Aires and spent much of his time researching ideas.

I am not an erudite scholar, so I cannot reproduce the intimately wide knowledge of the history of ideas that Borges was capable of. However, to illustrate the depth to which one can go when looking for the true origin of an interesting ideas, here is a passage from André Maurois’ introduction to Labyrinths, a fantastic collection of Borges’s short stories that I warmly recommend:

“[Borges’s] sources are innumerable and unexpected. [He] has read everything, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound - he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas - but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: ‘Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.’ Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds it in Giordano Bruno (1584): ‘We can assert with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’ But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the Corpus Hermeticum (third century): ‘God is an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.’”

Nothing new under the sun

Thousands of years ago, an unknown writer (purported to be Solomon the Wise) complained :

“What has been is what will be,
      and what has been done is what will be done,
      and there is nothing new under the sun.”

In today’s world, that seems hard to believe. Nary a week goes by without some new-fangled gadget or website. This especially affects the start-up world. Everyone is always trying to come up with the Next Big Thing, and here again, it is easy to confuse and merge the quest for success with the quest for newness or originality. As with art, the latter is misleading, dangerous, and futile.

There were auction sites before eBay. There were classified sites before Craigslist. There were money transfer sites before PayPal. There were social networks before Facebook. There were search engines before Google. Each and every online success had precursors, some of them very successful. None can honestly claim that they did anything really new. At best, they can claim that they did something better.

The truth is, being the first to come up with a great idea for an online site would be more a curse than a blessing. If it happened to be a really good idea, it would burn a hole in your mind and never let you rest until you had seen it implemented. However, any idea that is truly completely new would likely be alien and bizarre to most people. You would need many years of bashing people on the head before they finally realised your genius. In a way, having such an idea would condemn you to decades of never-ending failure until the world finally caught on — and by then it would probably be someone else’s implementation of it that took over. This is the hidden sting beneath Howard Aiken’s quote, “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

Is it even possible to come up with something completely new, or was Solomon truly wise on this matter too? It all really depends on your definition of new, of course. What about the first person who created an online social network site. Well, it was new in the sense that it wasn’t online yet. But was it truly new? Hardly. Social networking is such a powerful concept on the web only because it is such a powerful concept outside the web. There have been many sorts of organisations, both businesses and others, who have focused on allowing people to extend their social networks. Societies, clubs, cafés, pubs and gala events, etc, are all social gathering places where people reinforce and extend their social network. Facebook, in a sense, is like an online club which optimises that process, but it is only new in small, ancillary ways.

Power concepts

The point that I’m driving at (and that I failed to quite explain in this comment thread on YCNews), is not that it’s impossible to come up with a new idea. Of course it is possible. Google’s PageRank algorithm was new in its application to search engines. I’m not denying the creativity of people who come up with new businesses or artistic creations. In fact, creating a successful new business doesn’t take one creative idea - it takes many thousands.

However, when you look at the ecosystem of ideas as a whole, there are only a few really powerful ideas out there. Depending on how you slice the cake, that “few” can be literally a handful or hundreds, but all of the key ideas have been uncovered already, and successful “new” business ideas are merely extensions and variations of existing, powerful business ideas in new directions. eBay is just a marketplace — that’s existed for many thousands of years — spread to the whole connected world. Facebook is the fireplace in the middle of the encampment — virtualised onto every computer. Craigslist is the town crier — multiplied by ten million.

When you’re looking for that new business idea, don’t bother trying to be original, or to come up with something completely new. If your idea is really different from each of those power ideas, chances are it won’t be a successful business. Far better to link your idea up to some powerful, key human concepts than to try and keep it separate.

Back to square one - the world inside your head

Let’s step back to the art world for a few more inspirational thoughts. Art is not just about what you express, but also about what the viewer, reader, listener — the appreciator of the art — takes in. A hundred million people throughout the modern and ancient world have probably said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. Even if your work seems unworthy, even if is is a bad copy, someone might see something in it.

Some years ago, I watched a movie, Jakob the Liar, which finished with a puzzling proposition. The protagonist was dead, shot in the head by a nazi officer for refusing to deny the hope of the people in the ghetto, and those people were packed into trains. The movie proposed two possible endings. In one, they ended up all dead in a concentration camp; in the other, they were rescued by Russian tanks halfway to Auschwitz. I’m grateful to this movie, as it presented a very powerful idea.

The world inside your head is yours to do what you please with. If you see something that is clearly a “bad copy of a good thing”, instead of putting it down, look for the good thing hidden inside, and see how it could be a better thing yet. If you feel so inclined and are capable of it, perhaps you should take that opportunity to make your own, better copy of that good thing.

Next time you catch a bad movie in the cinema, see if you can improve it in your head. You will be rewarded immediately with a better movie.

The web is an amazing thing for many reasons. One of them is that it makes the copying process quasi free and inherently allows anyone to copy anyone else. The result is a fascinating vortex things both great and appalling, many of them copies of copies of copies of something that wasn’t worth much in the first place. Start by making a copy of a good thing instead of a bad one, and you’re one step ahead already.

Even if your creation is imperfect, or even downright bad, let the world judge for itself. Others may see more into it than even you intended or imagined. I’ll close this with a translation of Yves Duteil, a French singer, from his song Regard Impressioniste:

“The world has the beauty of our own gaze upon it
      The garden of Monet, the sun of Renoir,
      Are only the reflection of their vision of things
      For which each of us can be the mirror.”