Stuart K. Hayashi
Steve Jobs was wise in many ways but, to his everlasting detriment, he
popularized one of Silicon Valley’s most nauseating clichés and misconceptions. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Jobs
misattributed this saying to Pablo Picasso. The expression itself does not come from Picasso, though he did say something similar. The painter Françoise Gilot, a colleague to that well-known cubist,
remembers him saying, “When there’s anything to steal, I steal.”
The expression actually comes from the poet T. S. Eliot, though he qualified the expression more than Jobs did. The quotation is
found in one of Eliot’s essays in his volume
The Sacred Wood where he reviews literary scholar Alfred Cruickshank’s monograph on playwright Philip Massinger. Cruickshank argues that Massinger very artfully pays homage to conventions set by William Shakespeare. Eliot disagrees, considering Massinger’s work a low-quality pastiche of the bard. In that context, Eliot says,
One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. [George] Chapman [poet, playwright, and professor of Stoic philosophy] borrowed from [ancient-Roman Stoic philosopher] Seneca; Shakespeare and [poet John] Webster from [seventeenth-century French philosopher Michel de] Montaigne. . . . Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal [although, unlike Cruickshank, Eliot argues that Massinger did a poor job of it; emphasis added].
Despite Eliot’s use of the word
steal, Eliot’s original quotation does partially concede — albeit cringingly — that there is some degree of originality after all, though Eliot insists on apologizing for it as a “good” form of “theft.” Even that reluctant concession is removed from Steve Jobs’s iteration. That makes Steve Jobs’s the dumbed-down version. To quote Eliot myself, in this instance Jobs is being a “bad poet.” Jobs borrowed from Eliot, making the quotation a bit “different from that which it was torn,” yet still the opposite of “better.”
Altogether, “good artists copy, great artists steal” is said today with insinuations that are both misleading and cynical. For that reason, this cliché deserves to go out of circulation. It is especially disheartening that the cliché is most popular in Silicon Valley, a place once associated with progress and innovation — neither of which can exist if there is no originality.
The immediate question to address is why I would object to this cliché when the
steal is not meant to be taken literally. Steve Jobs and T. S. Eliot did not mean that they engaged in literal theft. Nor is that meant by the many Silicon Valley engineers who recite the cliché. But consider what the cliché implies. It mentions only two categories of artist, “good” and “great.” It says good artists “copy,” meaning that originality on their part is to be de-emphasized. But what about the other category, the “great artists”? In contrast to the “good artists,” the “great artists steal.”
Even as the cliché is said with one’s tongue in one’s cheek, the intention is still to presume that originality must not be considered as an option or even a possibility. That conspicuous omission is similar to the cliché of people saying that what defines your personality as an adult was either your “nature,” meaning inborn biological drives, or “nurture,” the influence that people other than yourself had exerted upon you in the past. The fact that you have free will, and that your personality as an adult is primarily the result of whom you choose to be, is not acknowledged as an option in “nature versus nurture.” Likewise, the upshot of “Good artists copy, great artists steal” is that either you are unoriginal or you are unoriginal, and there is no other alternative.
The insinuation is that originality is nonexistent or, at best, overrated. That insinuation is frequently cited as a rationalization for Silicon Valley companies gaining reputations for having invented particular new product features themselves when they had taken those features unacknowledged from elsewhere.
T. S. Eliot’s misleading phrasing is repeated by Austin Kleon in his book
Steal Like an Artist. According to Kleon, as even works hailed for originality still follow some conventions, every act of creativity constitutes “theft.” The real distinction, says Kleon, is that there is “good theft” versus “bad theft.” Here, Kleon clunkily rephrases Eliot’s dichotomy, making Kleon’s version itself a form of “bad theft.” “Bad theft,” per Eliot, is when someone takes attributes of others’ works to create something inferior. That is what Kleon calls a “rip-off.” By contrast, when you mix other people’s styles and methods together to create something of high quality — perhaps even surpassing the source material — that is not a rip-off but what Kleon says is much better: a “re-mix.”
Various YouTube videos on artistic inspiration
gladly repeat Kleon and therefore conclude, “Buddy, nothing is original, or at least not
quote-unquote ‘original’ like you think it is.” You can see such videos denying originality-as-such over
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here and
here. There are even TEDx Talks promulgating as much, as you can see
here,
here here, and
here. People who utter lines like that always do so in a self-congratulatory manner, as if they are giving an insight of the utmost philosophic profundity. It makes sense for these people to say nothing is original when they themselves all sound alike. And the pretentiousness is sometimes accompanied with lines like,
We humans want to believe we are so ingenious that we can come up with great ideas out of nowhere, but that is sheer hubris.
Hence, goes the assertion,
by confessing that there is no true originality — only re-mixes at best — we as a species are finally learning some much-needed humility. The philosophic YouTube video essayist Thomas Rebour airs those sentiments overtly in the conclusion of
his own work on the topic.
The social-media-influencer and businesswoman Simrand Anand is not as pompous about this as is Thomas Rebour’s YouTube video. Still, on the social medium Threads, Ms. Anand
does insist that developments that make truly important impacts in life actually are “not original. It’s just synthesis. That’s the magic. Synthesis is the real game now.” Fittingly enough, she is yet another TEDx Talks speaker. And she adds, “No one starts from scratch. Everyone is remixing.” That part is less synthesis or re-mix than just regular repetition of others.
Aristotle already pointed out that works celebrated as original do still have properties that are familiar and conventional. But, as we shall see later in this essay, the presence of those familiar-and-conventional properties do not negate the presence of originality. Nor should the presence of those familiar-and-conventional properties be cited — as the aforementioned people do — as an excuse to pronounce what are outright slights against the virtue of originality.
The YouTube vlogger Thoughty2
says, “The inception of a one-hundred-percent unique idea is not possible.” For that reason, he titles his YouTube video, “In Your Lifetime You'll Never Think of an Original Idea.”
Likewise, marketing expert Tom Sargent
pronounces, “Once you accept ‘originality’ is basically a well-dressed lie, you can stop agonizing over ‘being unique.’ ”
Branding expert Rachel Lee
adds, “There is no such thing as originality in terms of ideas, concepts, styles. There’s nothing you can create that hasn’t been created in some similar way, shape, or form.”
“Was there a point in history,”
says “Erografos,” “where humans had original ideas? My personal opinion is ‘no.’”
The vlogger “Propeller Duck”
begins his own video, “The concept of a completely original idea in the modern age is an often-sought-after concept despite the fact that it’s utterly impossible and, frankly, has been since the birth of modern civilization and art itself.”
I will give you an example of someone proposing an idea that, prior to its own proposition, was unprecedented for all of human history: the existence of airwaves. Except for light — which the first conceiver of airwaves had found to be an airwave having taken a special form — preindustrial humans could not detect airwaves by means of smell, taste, touch, hearing, or sight directly. However, we know that airwaves other than light do exist because radios, television sets, walkie-talkies, satellite communicators, mobile phones, and wireless internet modems rely on them to function — they rely on the sending of data signals through the airwaves. Microwave ovens also rely on airwaves, as do compass needles, X-rays, and radar. Were it the case that no airwaves other than light existed, these machines would not operate. We cannot see or hear non-light airwaves, but we can see and hear their practical effects.
In 1865, a true Scotsman named James Clerk Maxwell considered various natural phenomena that had stumped the greatest thinkers, phenomena that only a handful of scientists thought were related to one another. He devised an integrated theory that would account for all of these phenomena. This was his theory of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation — also known as airwaves. Then in 1888, the German scientist Heinrich Hertz conducted experiments that
demonstrated the veracity of Maxwell’s theory,
proving that airwaves exist.
Ancient people’s tales of unseen spirits and gods affecting the material realm is not an anticipation of the discovery of airwaves — these invisible spirits were said to be conscious and have emotions, and to be able to choose to change their behavior. By contrast, airwaves are wholly impersonal and operate according to consistent principles of Nature.
It is true, again, that Maxwell proposed this theory to account for various phenomena that scientists had observed in the past, sometimes even centuries prior. Maxwell’s theory accounts for observations about static electricity that Thales offered in ancient Greece. The existence and nature of airwaves also account for the fact, discovered by ancient Song-dynasty Chinese sailors, that the needle of a compass points north. And ancient Greeks such as Aristotle did talk of an invisible and impersonal force in the air that they called “ether,” and Maxwell himself hypothesized
over it. But, despite ancient people making observations concerning static electricity, lightning, and magnetization, they did not think of these as integral to their idea of “ether.” Maxwell went to his death believing in “ether,” but Albert Einstein
proved that scientific acceptance of the existence and properties of airwaves does not rely at all on believing in “ether.”
Other physicists such as Michael Faraday, André-Marie Ampère, and Carl Gauss preceded Maxwell by decades in making then-considered-separate observations that there must be principled relationships between electricity and magnetism, and, hence, these men each discovered and described specific scientific laws concerning these relationships. Prior observations about the connection of electricity to magnetism were made by William Thomson, who would later be known as Lord Kelvin. Here, the originality-deniers can point to those older observations to proclaim that Maxwell’s theory was not original after all. But that is part of originality-denial’s manipulative mind-game, where emphasis is placed on the familiar-and-conventional aspects to overshadow the aspect that is novel. The originality-deniers would say that because Maxwell’s theory is to account for phenomena that prior scientists had discovered and were still puzzled by, Maxwell’s theory is
nothing beyond a “re-mix” of the other scientists’ work. And to try to minimize this insight of Maxwell’s in such a way is churlish. Maxwell’s theory was an integration of much-older ideas and observations, yet the integration itself was startingly new.
André-Marie Ampère, Carl Gauss, and Michael Faraday each preceded Maxwell in devising specific equations to describe the relationships between electricity and magnetism, but it was Maxwell who conceived of there being invisible and usually-undetectable airwaves that would provide a unifying explanation for all of these phenomena. And in his calculations, Maxwell found that all electro-magnetic waves travel at the speed of light. As nothing but light could travel at that speed, Maxwell deduced by Aristotelian syllogism that light itself must be an electro-magnetic wave. Also by Aristotelian syllogism, Maxwell deduced that electricity, magnetism, and light all consisted of the same basic type of force. That insight about light being connected to electricity and magnetism had not been anticipated even by Ampère, Gauss, or Faraday.
(
This video notes the ways in which electricity, magnetism, and light are similar and where they differ. All of them pertain to the activity of electrons. Electricity is the result of electrons changing location. Magnetism is created when electrons spin in the same direction as one another. And light is created by the state of electrons being altered from higher to lower, resulting in the release of photons.)
To conduct his his own experiment that proved Maxwell’s theory, Hertz had his own special equipment. Hertz reasoned that if Maxwell’s theory was correct, then Hertz would be able to transmit sparks — signals — wirelessly from one machine (a transmitter) to another device (a receiver). The transmitter was an induction coil, and the receiver was a copper wire. The goal would be to use the induction coil to send signals that caused the copper wire to spark. As the copper wire was not connected by any material object to the induction coil, there would be no means by which Hertz could transmit electrical signals to the copper wire unless the signals could be sent over the invisible electro-magnetic radiation waves as described by Maxwell. And that is what Hertz accomplished.
(In the experimental sample, the induction coil and copper wire were close enough to one another so that, if Maxwell were right, the signals could be sent through the airwaves. By contrast, in the control sample, the induction coil and copper wire were further from one another — so much so that, even if Maxwell were correct, no signal should be sent. Had the copper wire been sparked even in the control sample, that would have told Hertz that his sparks were caused by something other than the presence of airwaves.)
This experiment was inspired by a happy accident. Hertz originally acquired the induction coil and copper wire to conduct a different experiment on gases. When he tried that other experiment, Hertz noticed that when he sent electricity through the induction coil, the copper wire would spark soon afterward, despite the induction coil and copper wire not touching one another. Many other people — even some scientists — would have chalked that up to some odd fluke and moved on, simply remaining focused on the initial plan. But Hertz remembered what he had heard of Maxwell’s theory of airwaves, and wondered if perhaps it was through these invisible electromagnetic waves that the induction coil was sending energy to the copper wire. He was thus inspired to set up the experiment I described earlier, and
repurposed the induction coil and the copper wire for that. In the early twentieth century, there was a saying: “ ‘Fortunate accidents’ are what happen to those who are wise enough to take advantage of them.” That applies here, being a much wiser saying than “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
I should note that someone else we shall hear from — Alexander Graham Bell — conducted a similar experiment eight years before Hertz. In his own experiment, Bell successfully transmitted data over a beam of light. As light is a type of airwave that has taken on a particular form, this means that, technically, Bell successfully transmitted signals over airwaves before Hertz did. However, Bell did not know that he had proven Maxwell’s model to be accurate, nor was Bell’s experiment trying to test Maxwell’s model. Instead, Bell was trying to see if he could devise a form of telecommunications other than his landline telephone. Bell’s experiment did presage modern telecommunications technology, as the transmission of data over beams of light is the principle behind the fiber-optic cables in our computer systems. Bell’s achievement here is important as well, but Hertz is the one who has rightfully been honored for having very intentionally and explicitly proven Maxwell’s model by means of experiment.
Maxwell’s mental integration here is something other than a “re-mix” of the ideas that served as its foundation. In conception and application it transcends the sum of its parts, providing a net gain in our ability to understand Nature and thereby derive practical benefits from such understanding.
One might try to make the excuse that in saying “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” one is merely trying to be cute and clever and not trying to belittle originality. According to this excuse, the importance of originality is common knowledge — so much so that there is no need to explicate it. Hence, goes the rationalization, when someone says, “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” it causes surprise exactly because most listeners would expect to hear about artists being original, only for the expected consideration to be omitted. But that rationalization does not withstand scrutiny. In that sort of phrasing, the implication is still the same as T. S. Eliot’s “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” The insinuation is that all artists have but two choices that are, respectively, 1) use the work of others in a mediocre fashion or 2) the use the work of others in a fashion that is better than mediocre. The insinuation is still to undercut the concept of originality and its stature.
If it were true that some Silicon Valley engineers just wanted to say “Good artists copy, great artists steal” to sound witty, they would have just said it a few times and then most everyone would have forgotten about it. Instead, the slogan endures in that region and industry exactly because those engineers do believe it articulates some deeper fundamental truth and principle that deserves to be applied. That YouTube is littered with intellectual videos with titles proclaiming the nonexistence of originality — with at least four TEDx Talks echoing that conclusion — is a testament to this idea having currency amid the zeitgeist.
This brings to mind that, besides the denial of originality overall, there is a second, somewhat-different-but-still-related interpretation of “Great artists steal.” Those who whitewash the second interpretation say that the cliché is not about denying originality completely but instead about stressing the success of entrepreneurs who apply a “Second-Mover Approach to Innovation” rather than a “First-Mover” approach. The interpretation is that when a business financially succeeds in acquainting its customers with a relatively new category of product, often that successful business is neither the technology’s inventor nor even the first business to place that technology on the market.
On that interpretation, the point of “Good artists copy, great artists steal” is not to deny that, in the case of personal computers, the graphical user interface and the mouse were invented by one innovative party, but to stress that it was the second mover, Steve Jobs at Apple Computer, and not the original inventor who gained business success from these developments.
There is much that is wrong even with that second interpretation of “great artists steal,” and its fallacies are derivative of the fallacies in the first interpretation. For most of this essay, I will focus on the originality-denial interpretation. Near the close of this essay I shall return to discussing the second interpretation, of the “second-mover advantage.”
And, when it comes to the first interpretation, there are many people who call themselves free-market libertarians who take the “Good artists copy, great artists steal” rationalization even farther.
Since the 1970s, the party line of the libertarian movement, in contrast to the Objectivist movement, has been to denigrate intellectual property rights (IPRs). It started with economist Murray Rothbard saying that patents are State-enforced monopolies of an industry and therefore should not exist. Then Wendy McElroy and Samuel Edward Conkin III added that the same accusation applies to copyrights on literature and other forms of art.
Excepting the Objectivist movement, the opposition to intellectual property rights continues to this day. And, as we shall see later, there are even a few self-described Objectivists who demean and deny the very concept of originality. The only differences among libertarians in opposition to IPRs is that there are factions who exploit different tactics in undermining them. The more openly-radical anarcho-“capitalists,” such as those at Liberty International (formerly the International Society for Individual Liberty, ISIL); Auburn, Alabama’s Ludwig von Mises Institute; and New York’s Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), say outright that they want IPRs abolished.
However, more-cautious people at libertarian think tanks in Washington, D.C., and Virginia, such as the Reason Foundation, know that such fanaticism is unpersuasive to most people, unpersuasive even to YouTube vloggers who rant about big media companies accusing their YouTube vlogs of copyright infringement. Hence, the more-cautious libertarians of D.C. think tanks have a different approach. They seldom spell it out that they want IPRs eliminated altogether. Instead, they watch for high-profile court cases that they anticipate will set precedents on where particular boundaries will be placed when it comes to how courts ascertain whether one party violated another’s IP. Any time the court case may set a precedent that will weaken, in future cases, the ability of plaintiffs to enforce their copyright, the D.C. libertarian think-tanks send out essays arguing for that weakening.
In their arsenal, such libertarians have myriad rationalizations for mischaracterizing IPRs as oppressive. I have refuted most of those rationalizations
here.
Among the rationalizations is the following. It is that
it is presumptuous and false for some party to claim to be the objectively discernible originator of some technological breakthrough or artwork. Some of the IPR-haters say that many parties simultaneously invented the innovation at the exact same time, which means no one party can rightfully claim to be the originator. And there are libertarian patent-haters who add that this alleged fact of “simultaneous invention” points to particular technological developments being inevitable. In that interpretation — such as what is argued by Kevin Kelly, one of
Wired magazine’s founding editors — there is a “determinism” to the development of technologies. That would mean that technological progress is teleological, working toward some end-goal —an End of History — that is beyond any individual person’s control. Some Rothbardian patent-haters have seized on this to
insinuate that every technological development came not from the initiative of some innovative party but instead was the result of the human collective, of many people in general and no one party in particular. Ergo, the argument goes, patents and copyrights should not exist.
Although he is not a libertarian and does not go as far as pronouncing that IPRs should be abolished, one very famous writer to
make this case about “simultaneous invention” is Malcolm Gladwell in
The New Yorker.
And that argument — including Malcolm Gladwell’s rendition of it — smacks around a straw man. A U.S. utility patent does not claim ownership over a general idea for a general category of product, such as “paperclip.” Rather, the U.S. utility patent is on a specific presentation, delineation, or application in the function that is often within an already-existing category of product. That is why, from 1867 to 1957, the U.S. Patent-and-Trademark Office granted at least 17 U.S. utility patents to at least 16 different parties for paperclips. It is also why each of these U.S. utility patents was granted prior to the expiration of the previous one.
Nor is it true — contrary to Malcolm Gladwell — that multiple parties arrive at the exact same invention at the exact same time. Rather, what happens is that different parties each — separated from one another by spans of time that are relatively short — independently arrive at general ideas that are similar. There have always been differences, however, in the specifics of how each party implements that general idea or general principle. When these separate parties litigate their IPRs, the dispute is over the areas where their different presentations and designs overlap one another. The traditional solution
has been for these separate parties to take these areas of overlap and pool them into a single joint trust. Even if there are similar inventions wrought from five separate parties, it does not follow that the inventions should be in the public domain. If these five parties, each currently antagonistic toward the others, can each make a valid case to have contributed to invention, it does not follow — contrary to the
Rothbardians’ assumptions — that parties outside of these five are entitled to unauthorized duplication of the new presentations and designs at the expense of the R-and-D performed by the five inventive parties.
Hence, if these five parties can each honestly claim to have contributed to invention, the fact that their number exceeds one still fails to invalidate the properness of enforcing patents.
I have addressed, in greater detail, the “government-enforced monopoly” falsehood and the “simultaneous-invention” red herring
over here.
And when it comes to the attempt to deny originality itself, the falsehood is worse still. The attempt to deny originality is a rationalization cited to counter the fact that when separate parties arrive at similar delineations and designs, they can simply pool their patents. The originality-deniers proclaim that the identities of the originators of an innovation cannot be isolated just to five parties, or even twenty parties, or even 135 parties. Rather, continues the false premise, innovations just come down to general “ideas,” and general “ideas” are just in-the-air. According to this fallacy, the specific originators of an innovation cannot be identified objectively, and so, for all intents and purposes, control over specific original and practicable demand-satisfying designs and presentations should be in the public domain and not isolated to the specific parties that invested their scarce resources into the R-and-D that led these parties to find the most practicable such design. You can see such an insinuation
over here.
And the cliché of “Good artists copy, great artists steal” is sometimes cited in the delivery of that fallacious rationalization. Even when “good artists copy, great artists steal” is not said explicitly, the popularity of that cliché reinforces, in the minds of many computer-coding libertarians, acceptance of the rationalization.
That fallacy relies on the false conflation of general “ideas” versus the actual very-specific and detailed presentations and designs that are subject to patent and copyright. I explain that
here.
However, here I discuss the “great artists steal” cliché because it has harmful effects that go even beyond the attempts to rationalize the violation of intellectual property rights. There are three types of lies with which “Good artists copy, great artists steal” is associated when it is uttered. They are:
- Originality, in general, is overrated. It is less important than our culture makes it out to be.
- No human creation is truly original anyway.
- Specific parties that have contributed to innovation — which, by implication, means that they exercised originality — cannot be objectively identified. This premise presumes that every attempt to credit some party as a great originator and innovator is a false pretense. It is a false pretense, we are to believe, from the poisonous ideology of individualism. It is similar to the “Great Man Theory of History,” the conviction that history is driven by the pivotal choices of specific individuals rather than by the collective of everyone in general and nobody in particular. [The denial of the fact that, yes, history is largely driven by pivotal choices of specific individuals, should be a topic for another time.] Here, a favorite talking point of originality-deniers is that any time you believe you have identified the first party ever to have implemented a particular innovation, it will turn out later that someone else beat that other party to it. And if you switch to saying that this “someone else” was the first, it will turn out someone else did it still earlier. And on and on.
Contradicting each of those three points respectively, the realities are these.
- The phenomenon of human originality still does not receive enough due credit in any culture. Even cultures reputed to be more-individualistic, such as that of the United States, are still guilty of giving short shrift to the importance of human originality. The popularity of the cliché “Good artists copy, great artists steal,” in a region and industry once celebrated from innovativeness, itself exemplifies that.
- History is full of examples of specific individuals being original.
- Specific individuals who contributed to innovation — and therefore exercised originality — can be objectively identified. Indeed, there are many historical examples of this. Yes, there are many attempts to discredit the fact that specific originators have been identified properly. These attempts are similar to the red herring of “simultaneous invention.” Such attempts include the denial of the originality of the Wright brothers when it comes to their airplane. These discreditations, also, attempt to obscure the distinction between general “ideas” versus the specifics of presentation-and-design to which patents and copyrights apply.
The essay you are now reading, attempts to address all three of the above points at least to some degree. However, this essay will be mostly about Point Number 2. This essay will provide case studies of originality and progress in art. We focus on art because it is a discipline whose history is commonly and falsely cited as proof that originality is an illusion — that everything credited as “original” and innovative turns out not to be.
Though this essay is a defense of artistic originality and — this should never have been necessary — an acknowledgment of artistic originality’s existence and importance, I must also spell out what this essay is not. I am not arguing that originality is the be-all end-all of art. I am not arguing that originality is the most important aspect of art.
This is not to say that the identifiable first-ever usage of a style or device in an artwork is necessarily the best instance of it — that is usually not the case. There are works of art that are a historic “first” in terms of a particular style or device being used, and yet do not use that style or device as effectively as do much-later works. There are also instances where an artwork is a historic “first” and yet otherwise does not provide any especially moving emotional experience. By the same token, there are great artworks that, though showing a significant degree of originality, were made by artists who had “originality” relatively low on their list of priorities. As long as they do not partake in outright plagiarism, I do not want any artists to debilitate their own efforts out of worry over how derivative versus how original their works are in comparison to others’.
But what I
am saying is that originality
does exist, it
is important, and our culture should cease in its demeaning of it in the form of such clichés as “Great artists steal” and “Nothing in art has ever truly been new.” The prevalence of those clichés indicate not that our culture has too much reverence for individualistic originality but too little respect for it.
Intellectuals Quoting Prominent People — Even Inventors — That Artistic Originality Is a “Myth”
You might be surprised what sort of prominent people have offered their own spins on the rationalization that downplays originality. It comes even from prominent people who, in contexts where more was at stake financially, jealously and rightfully defended their own IPRs. Alexander Graham Bell, for instance, is justly renowned for having invented the electric landline telephone, only to be smeared by Rothbardian libertarians who accuse him falsely of having covered-up the “simultaneous invention” of electric landline telephones with rival engineer Elisha Gray, scientist Philip Reis,
and even
fraudster Daniel Drawbaugh. Those accusations were soundly refuted in the
biography by Robert V. Bruce, who had won the Pulitzer for another history of science. Despite that fact, and despite Bell having properly upheld his patents in court, there have been other contexts in which Bell himself fallaciously repeated the originality-deniers’ favorite talking points.
A very intellectual blog that has frequently expressed sympathy for the originality-deniers’ position
approvingly quotes Bell on this topic. Given Bell’s experiences pertaining directly to questions of originality and of IPRs, Bell’s own originality-denialism must seem compelling. In a letter to Helen Keller’s teacher Annie Sullivan, Bell professes,
Our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions derived from others. . . . Our forms of expression are copied — verbatim et literatim — in our earlier years from the expressions of others which we have heard in childhood. It is difficult for us to trace the origin of our expressions because the language addressed to us in infancy has been given by word of mouth, and not permanently recorded in books so that investigators — being unable to examine printed records of the language addressed to us in childhood — are unable to charge us with plagiarism. We are all of us however, nevertheless unconscious plagiarists, especially in childhood. As we grow older and read books the language we absorb through the eye, unconsciously affects our style.
Someone else who should have defended the importance of originality was Mark Twain. Not only was he an author but also an inventor with several U.S. utility patents to his name. That same intellectual blog
happily quotes Twain saying,
As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. . . . It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone or any other important thing — and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that [emphases Twain’s].
In the title of the intellectual blog post that quotes those words
is even the phrase “The Myth of Originality.” And the same blog
smugly quotes Tropic of Cancer author Henry Miller in declaring,
And your way, is it really your way? . . .
What, moreover, can you call your own? The house you live in, the food you swallow, the clothes you wear — you neither built the house nor raised the food nor made the clothes. . . .
The same goes for your ideas. You moved into them ready-made.
Note that Henry Miller’s argument is a variation on President Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That.” Houses, food, and clothing are produced through a market-based division of labor. That is not a social collective but the sum of many different individuals’ actions. In your job you produce economic value, what is more commonly known as “wealth.” And you trade that value to others for money. Once you have traded away, for money, the units of economic value you have produced directly, the quantity of economic value that you had produced is now stored in the money. In turn, when you exchange that money for a house, food, and clothes, it is the matter that the quantity of economic value you have indeed produced yourself is now retained in those possessions.
You have produced economic value on your own and then, through trade, converted that value into the house, food, and clothing that you retain. What Henry Miller elides is that, though you did not create the house, food, or clothes directly, you did create
their value; you created the value that is now stored in everything willingly traded to you.
Similar to the originality-deniers’ argument, You-Didn’t-Build-That takes the fact that many people cooperated in helping an entrepreneur succeed and then tries to “spin” that in proclaiming that the entrepreneur’s success was due not to the entrepreneur’s choices primarily but instead to everyone in general and nobody in particular. And President Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren cite their false premise to proclaim that the entrepreneur is duty-bound to “give back” to that society of everyone-in-general-and-nobody-in-particular. And that “giving back” is to take the form of the entrepreneur putting on the pretense of consenting when President Obama and Sen. Warren exercise the power of the State to extract wealth and overrule the consensual contracts the entrepreneur has made with others. But as I have
pointed out before, the entrepreneur already did pay everyone who helped her succeed, and she does have a record of the specific individuals who contributed to her success. That record is called the entrepreneur’s “payroll.”
Likewise, we do have a record of innovations that, until specific points in history, were completely unprecedented. Also likewise, when it comes to relatively recent innovations, there are times when we can ascertain reliably the identity of who originated what.
Henry Miller’s argument relies on a Stolen Concept. For over 90 percent of human history, there was no method to obtain food except hunter-gathering. There was no agriculture. For a particular region, someone had to be the first to have the idea to plant seeds and grow crops. Some ancient person was the first to have the idea of putting an animals’ pelt on one’s own body to keep warm. Some ancient person had to be the first to have the idea that instead of relying on a cave to protect from the elements, one could create a makeshift shelter in the wilderness, the first huts.
The fact that humans are capable of artistic originality, to me, is so obvious that it breaks my heart that I find it necessary to write an essay to explain this. To give you an idea of why I find it important, I will recount some conversations that show how trendy it is for intellectual people deny the fact of originality.
The Fact of Artistic Originality Denied By People Who Claim to Love a Book That Glorifies Originality
To show why I find this topic quite pressing, I want to tell of some of my experiences grappling with these ideas. A real eye-opener for me, when it comes to recognizing the significance of originality, was when I read
The Fountainhead. This book is all about innovation. And the same goes for
Atlas Shrugged. Whereas most of the other architects of the early twentieth century insist on making modern buildings resemble those of the past — Ralston Holcombe with his Renaissance style, and the builders of the Aquitania Hotel going with the Gothic style — Howard Roark takes a new path. Roark is not the first of the school of modern architecture, but he is one of its early practitioners. This new school of thought is consistent with a scientific appreciation for the world itself, applying the principle enunciated by the real-life modern-architecture pioneer Louis Henri Sullivan, “Form must follow function.” And as demonstrated by the novel’s climax, Roark will go to great lengths to protect the integrity of the very specific designs through which his original ideas find their implementation.
The emphasis in
The Fountainhead on the importance of originality is corollary both to its explorations of human individualism and of technological progress.
Dictionary.Com
says that to
innovate is “to introduce something new; make changes in anything established.” To the extent that innovation and “progress” refer to unprecedented improvements in the procedures by which human beings carry their affairs, innovation and progress are predicated upon originality. Originality refers to initiation and initiative. As innovation and progress refer to a series of beneficent changes, that series would not commence if not for that first change, that first step, like a first ancient mutant fish stepping onto shore. The Totality of Existence did not need some supernatural entity, one external to all of Existence, to bring Existence itself into being. But everything of human affairs within Existence does need to be set in motion by a mover, a
Prime Mover. If the transmission of ideas is a river, the waterflow had some source . . . the fountainhead.
In
The Fountainhead, Howard Roark is not the first modern architect, but he appreciates the fact that he had beneficent forebearers, such as his mentor Henry Cameron, who
did start modern architecture. Likewise, the real-life innovative designer Frank Lloyd Wright did recognize and appreciate the fact that modern architecture did have a first practitioner, possibly his mentor Louis Henri Sullivan.
Absent of the innovation’s origin — the manifestation of someone’s originality — there is no innovation and no technological progress. To say that there is innovation and technological progress but that there has never been originality — and, sadly, there are some intellectual people who say that — is to commit what Ayn Rand identifies as the Fallacy of the Stolen Concept (“stolen,” in this context, being the mark of a low-quality artist).
And just as beneficent progress presupposes originality, originality itself presupposes the psychological individualism that informs Howard Roark’s individualistic ethics. If someone in the arts or the design field merely copies the achievements of others, that copycat is relying on the judgment of those others more than her own. And the result will be that everything goes unimproved. Hence, the degree to which some party in arts and the design field is able to to devise some improvement in methodology is the degree to which that party had deviated from the strict emulation of others. That is, the extent to which that party devised an improvement in method is the extent to which that party had applied independence of thought to the matter. Most acts of psychological independence do not result in its practitioner gaining an insight that had been without precedent in all of human history. But in every instance where someone
did piece together an insight unprecedented in human history, it was, by definition, formed — and identified as such — only through that person’s exercise of psychological independence.
Such psychological independence does not entail someone behaving strangely just for the sake behaving strangely and inviting others to gawk. If a man insisted on going out with his pants on backward, that would not be following convention, but it is doubtful that this would represent a great advancement in culture. Hence,
The Fountainhead also satirizes the counterfeit individualism of pretentious hipsters. By contrast, as one thinks independently in drawing from the facts, there are moments when this independent thinker will notice and acknowledge something that other experts in the discipline either have not noticed or at least have not acknowledged sufficiently. In such cases, it is good for that thinker to bring attention to that which deserves more consideration. James Clerk Maxwell proposing the existence of airwaves is a fine case study in such psychological independence. And he had a similar contemporary in another science. In the 1800s when most educated men were still Young-Earth Creationists, Charles Darwin also showed important initiative.
As he himself
publicly acknowledged in writing, Charles Darwin was nowhere near to being the first person to present evidence for the general phenomenon of biological evolution — not even the first
in his own family. As
far back as ancient Greece, the philosophers Anaximander and Empedocles anticipated aspects of modern evolutionary theory, the former going as far as saying humans descended from a fish-like creature. During the Aristotle-influenced Islamic Golden Age, there
were even Muslim philosophers who foresaw attributes of evolutionary theory. And much of the case that Darwin made had relied upon discoveries from other scientists, such as the geologist Charles Lyell. Yet such people who theorized over biological evolution had still been fewer than a thousand in number, possibly even fewer than a hundred.
Even considering the many forebearers, it was still through an act of psychological independence that Darwin accepted the facts. Both he and Alfred Russel Wallace made an advancement — an evolutionary leap in science itself — by explaining not merely the general idea of biological evolution but the specific mechanism by which it occurs: the process of natural selection.
Yes, other scientists preceded Darwin and Wallace in pointing out that all backboned land-dwellers descended from a fish. And, yes, other scientists such as Linnaeus preceded Darwin and Wallace in pointing out that human beings and the great apes descended from a common ancestor that was a hairy primate. But what was new and original from Darwin and Wallace was the following much-more-specific model. Within an environment, there is variation in physical features among different members of the same species. The species members with physical features unsuited to that environment die prior to being able to secure, for the long term, the future of their respective genealogical lines. By contrast, members of the species who have physical features that suit them to life in their environment are those that procreate successfully. In turn they transmit, to future generations, the very same physiological traits that had helped them thrive in that environment.
Among such variations in physiological traits, there can be some fishes in a swampy environment whose swim bladders help them breathe outside of water, and whose pectoral fins help them crawl around. And if such physical features help fishes thrive and procreate in that swampy environment to a degree greater than fishes of the same species who do not possess such traits, then, over generations, the land-crawling fishes will come to outnumber the ones who cannot crawl. That would especially be helpful if, as has happened in the Earth’s Devonian Period, microorganisms in the swampy water had made it so that the water taken in by the swamp’s fish inhabitants no longer provided them enough air, making it necessary for them to inhale air directly outside the water. And if this trend continues for a long-enough amount of time — millions of years — entire new clades of lifeforms may emerge, as did the first backboned four-legged land-dwellers in around 390 Million BCE. (Even
they had their own historic “firsts!”) That was the specific process of natural selection, not articulated specifically even by the theorists of biological evolution who had preceded Darwin and Wallace.
And in the 1930s, scientists such as Ronald Fisher, unlike Darwin and Wallace, became aware of the discovery of dominant- and recessive genetics in Gregor Mendel’s experiments on pea plants. These scientists of the 1930s understood that genetics, as discovered by Mendel, accounted for the variation of which Darwin and Wallace had spoken. Hence this cadre of pioneers, led by Ronald Fisher, exercised their own originality and creativity in synthesizing the discoveries of Darwin-Wallace with Mendel.
And that someone other than Darwin had also pieced-together the fact of natural selection, does not, contrary to Malcolm Gladwell, discredit the fact of originality.
Had Henry Miller been right that all ideas are — in his words — “ready-made,” then it would mean that Darwin and Wallace deserve no more credit for explaining natural selection than did all of their contemporaries who did not describe, or conceive of, natural selection. And it would mean that these two men do not deserve any more credit for discovering natural selection than did people, such as Bishop Wilberforce, who actively denied the reality of biological evolution. Moreover, Darwin demonstrated evolution’s reality to a degree that even Alfred Russel Wallace did not. Darwin’s intellectual journey is a real-life example of the sort of phenomenon that The Fountainhead dramatizes.
Though it has been said that Steve Jobs himself admired Ayn Rand’s writings, Roark himself has some choice words for those who snicker that good artists copy and great artists steal. In the script of the movie adaptation starring Gary Cooper, also written by Rand,
Roark says,
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. The man who thinks must think and act on his own. . . .The creator stands on his own judgment; the parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks; the parasite copies.
Roark
expresses the same idea in the original novel. But this time, his phrasing is more like T. S. Eliot’s than Steve Jobs’s:
We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. . . .
Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways — by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows.
Note that Ayn Rand does not say that an innovation comes fully formed completely out of nowhere like Athena out of the head of Zeus. Roark says very plainly that, of course, innovators typically learned from the well-demonstrated developments of their forebears. What is of pertinence to this discussion, though, is that the innovator then takes the “next step.” And as the innovator pays well-earned gratitude toward those forebears, the new “step” taken by the innovator is to be attributed properly to, and rightfully owned by, that innovator herself. That “next step” does not belong to the forebears who inspired and taught the innovator as, by definition, those forebears did not take that “next step.” Nor can that “next step” — nor the fruits of it — be rightfully credited to everyone else in society who expressed no more than a mild interest in contributing directly to the innovator’s pursuit of that innovation. It was the innovative party that took that next step; all the other people did not. That is why the innovative design or presentation that the rational faculty “creates” is rightfully “the property of the creator.”
That the innovative process occurs in a nexus of both familiar and unfamiliar ideas is an observation that goes back at least as far as Aristotle in his treatise on plays and drama,
Poetics.
Poetics itself might be an innovative “first” — as I type this, scholars commonly
regard it as the oldest-known work on literary criticism and literary analysis.
Aristotle’s explanation is as follows. For something to interest you, it has to have a fortuitous balance of elements that are familiar and those that are unfamiliar. If something is completely familiar to me, then there is nothing left for me to learn about it, and therefore I am too bored to bother with it. By the same token, if something is completely unfamiliar, then it seems not to have anything to do with me either, and therefore I need not bother with
that.
But that dynamic shifts with the proper balance of familiarity with the strange. That there are aspects of something that are familiar means that it pertains to me and might address concerns I already have. Additionally, that there are aspects that are alien means that there is still more to learn. Put another way, I can take a new perspective on something I had previously thought I knew much about, and then examine it from this new angle. That there is some familiarity which is incomplete, is what draws my interest. In turn, that the alien aspects might shine additional light on what I had thought was familiar, sustains that interest. This can also be phrased as a balance of the known (familiar) with the unknown (alien).
That need to have a balance between the familiar and the strange extends to whether a new invention will be properly adopted by consumers and satisfy their marketplace demand. The twentieth-century industrial designer Raymond Loewy had his own manner of phrasing it. He
deciphered that for the marketplace to adopt a new design, it should be “MAYA — Most Advanced [the unfamiliar side] Yet Acceptable [the familiar side].”
From misinformation researcher Matthew Facciani on Threads, I learned that psychologist Todd Kashan also described this phenomenon. As Dr. Kashan
explicates, “Curiosity peaks when our knowledge is neither too little [strange] nor too much [familiar], but just right...”
When it comes to originality, the familiar element is the material that is reconfigured to form something new. The earliest religions, such as in Bronze-Age Mesopotamia and even
early Judaism, did not postulate that God created Existence from absolute nothingness. Rather, they
posited that
Existence always existed, and that, from these materials already existing, a creator deity such as Marduk refashioned the world into the form in which we currently know it. That is not
creatio ex nihilo but
creatio ex materia. This
creatio ex materia is a term that also applies to human originality in art and technology.
This is what Austin Kleon mislabels a “re-mix” — with all the connotations downplaying the significance of the novel element — in his
Steal Like an Artist. I hope that by this essay’s conclusion, the reader can see why even calling an innovation a very competent, beautiful “re-mix” is still to understate its significance and obscure the fact it induces a net gain in humanity’s creative value.
Inasmuch as the invention has features that are familiar, I can understand the invention’s purpose and can learn how I may use it to address concerns that were already plaguing me. Conversely, the aspects of the new invention that are unfamiliar and unprecedented create the possibility either
- that the invention can solve for me a problem that previously could not be solved; or
- that the invention can mitigate a problem of mine to a degree that is greater than was mitigated by prior attempts at solutions.
That can be seen with how in the late twentieth century, baby-boomers and Generation X — already familiar with landline telephones — then adopted the usage of mobile phones, a technology pioneered by engineers like Martin Cooper. The mobile phones had attributes in common with the landline phones with which baby-boomers and Generation X were already accustomed. Like landline phones, mobile phones had keypads of buttons labeled by Arabic numerals from
0 to
9. As with landline phones, users would push these buttons to input the numbers of parties they intended to call. And again as with landline phones, users would put their ears next to a part called a “receiver,” from which the user would hear speech from the speaker on the line’s other end, and speak into another part called a “transmitter.” This is very consistent with principles that Heinrich Hertz applied with his experiment in which an induction coil served as a primitive transmitter and a copper wire as a makeshift receiver.
However, landline telephones were connected by landlines running through houses and other buildings. To use the landline telephone, one would be confined to a particular location. The landline phone’s transmitter converted speech and other sounds into electrical signals sent through the landline. At the receiver end, the electrical signals are converted back into sounds. What was new about mobile phones was that they did not require the landlines. When someone spoke into the transmitter, the sound was converted into signals sent instead through the electromagnetic spectrum all around us, the airwaves. These are the same airwaves that James Clerk Maxwell was being wholly original in deducing, by logical necessity, to exist. This aspect — that, at the time, was novel and alien to telephony — was what enabled consumers to carry on their phone conversations absent of the previous limitations imposed by geography.
Note that acknowledgment of, and appreciation for, Martin Cooper’s innovation here does no injustice to the forebears on whose work he had built, such as Alexander Graham Bell. Contrary to Mark Twain’s presumption, to recognize that originality on Martin Cooper’s part has contributed to mobile phones emerging on the market when and how that they did — that this feat required some thoughts that were actually unprecedented — is not to minimize, snub, or “forget” predecessors from whom Martin Cooper had learned. Nay, it is simply to appreciate how the helpful aspects of this development came about because pioneers like Martin Cooper undertook intellectual integrations and actions that were new, novel, and indeed unprecedented.
Had there been nothing unprecedented in the works and thoughts of the engineers who pioneered in developing the first mobile phones, then mobile phones never would have found their way into households. All the electric telephones in existence would still only be landline ones. That would be the case if Henry Miller were right that the “ideas” of all people — including the engineers behind the earliest mobile phones — were “moved into... ready-made.” In 1955, the schematics needed to produce a practicable working mobile phone for consumers were not “ready-made.” And had these engineers’ thoughts been nothing but patchwork “re-mixes” of old ideas, providing no net gain in value beyond the sum of their parts — the patches — then that, too, would have resulted only in the failure to find any telephonic alternative to landlines.
The principle applies in every instance when the marketplace is hit with a new technology that dramatically changes much of human activity. And it applies even when the exact parties who originated that new technology cannot be identified with great confidence. There was a time when no humans had automobiles. Now we do have automobiles. At some point, for this to have happened, someone had to think some specific thoughts that no one in the past had ever conceived before. Someone had to have performed some specific actions that no in the past had ever undertaken before. Amid these developments, Carl Benz deserves acclaim for his three-wheeled motorized carriage, and Gottlieb Daimler has earned some fame for his four-wheeled creation as well.
In contrast to Mark Twain’s straw man, celebrating originality is not about giving short shift to the innovator’s predecessors, contemporaries, and competitors. Rather, celebrating originality is to acknowledge the fact that there are points in history where people are indeed capable of thinking thoughts and accomplishing feats that are unprecedented. These are thoughts and feats that are, in contrast to everything that human beings have already thought and done earlier, markedly distinguishable to an extent that is decisive.
With respect to how that which is interesting and innovative combines elements that are familiar and conventional with those that are novel, this is how Aristotle’s
Poetics puts it,
The perfection of style [in poetry, drama, and theatre] is to be clear without being mean [ordinary, mundane]. The clearest style is that which uses only current or proper [normal] words; at the same time it is mean [has some plainness]… The diction, on the other hand, is lofty and raised above the commonplace which employs unusual words. By unusual, I mean strange (or rare) words, metaphorical, lengthened — anything, in short, that differs from the normal idiom. Yet a style wholly composed of such [unfamiliar] words is either a riddle or a jargon [meaning confusing]… A certain infusion, therefore, of these elements [both the familiar and the strange] is necessary to style; for the strange (or rare) word, the metaphorical, the ornamental, and the other kinds above mentioned, will raise it above the commonplace and mean [mundane], while the use of proper [ordinary, everyday] words will make it perspicuous [easy to understand]. But nothing contributes more to produce a cleanness of diction that is remote from commonness than the lengthening, contraction, and alteration of words. For by deviating in exceptional cases from the normal idiom, the language will gain distinction; while, at the same time, the partial conformity with [everyday] usage will give perspicuity [clearness]. The critics, therefore, are in error who censure these [novel] licenses of speech, and hold the author up to ridicule.
That last line applies more broadly to our discussion. Those who cite the familiar and conventional elements of innovative designs and innovative presentations are lacking in perspective when they cite the conventionalities to downplay the importance of the aspects that are novel and unprecedented.
For these reasons, the point of Howard Roark’s that I quoted earlier is quite straightforward. But, to many people, it isn’t — even among some who have gushed about how much Ayn Rand and
The Fountainhead have inspired them.
I will tell you of two exchanges I had.
Years ago, tired of rationalizations for originality-denial, such as those from Rothbardians and that intellectual blog to which I linked above, I took to Twitter. I tweeted,
“Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
—Insipid cliché
“Great artists originate.”
—Me
I anticipated that I might get a response from a churlish apologist of originality-denial. And I did. But it was not in the exact form I expected. It came from someone older than I am, Andrew of Generation X. We had not met face-to-face, but we did become a bit acquainted online. Around the middle of the twenty-first century’s first decade, Andrew had started one of the earliest blogs about Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. He had read Ayn Rand’s books, such as
The Fountainhead, and expressed that they inspired and informed him. Surely, I had thought, someone who publicly expressed such devotion to
The Fountainhead and Ayn Rand’s ideas would understand the importance of originality, especially with how it relates to individualism, psychological independence, and progress.
Well, as it turned out, no.
Presuming that I had never encountered it before — as opposed to the thousands of times that I had — Andrew proceeded with the usual straw-man argument, delivering the usual misrepresentation of what a defender of originality says. Andrew proceeded to recite how it
is true how great artists steal, because no work of greatness emerges
ex nihilo — the Latin expression what his exact words. Instead, as he recited in his whacking of the straw man, even in works of Shakespeare that are celebrated as original there is use of established conventions, or at least tropes that were new in Shakespeare’s time but which Shakespeare himself did not invent. What made Andrew’s mansplaining worse was that I had my real-time notifications on.
Exactly as Andrew was lecturing me condescendingly, Twitter had notifications appear on the screen showing the whole tweet. It began “1/3,” indicating that this was merely the start of a series. Not only was Andrew reciting the usual straw man at me, but it would not stop at one tweet; it would be a whole series.
Sick of this, I very bluntly tweeted at Andrew that I wanted him to spare me the straw man; no defender of originality says — or even implies — that any artwork or invention appreciated as novel just emerged
ex nihilo, absent of some more-conventional features pertaining to the preexisting context that innovation was made to address. Nor does acknowledging the existence and importance of originality hinge upon the notion that works of originality emerge
ex nihilo free of influence from any more-conventional predecessor.
Rather than
ex nihilo, the defenders of originality point out that originality arises
ex materia — out of already-existing material — and that, from a novel arrangement of the existing material, arises a net increase in economic value that is beyond any mere “re-mix,” that new net increase in value being an
Emergent Property.
To that, Andrew expressed his annoyance and tweeted “Jesus Christ. Calm down.”
I tweeted, less sharply than before, that I wouldn’t.
Andrew then tweeted some onomatopoeia conveying that his face fell flat on a desk in vicarious embarrassment for me, and said that he doesn’t have time for close-minded and “judgmental” people like me.
I expected some defensiveness on Andrew’s part, as that is common for Twitter and Facebook. But I did not anticipate, or initially recognize, the serious degree to which I had angered him.
Thinking this over for some minutes, I tweeted to Andrew that I apologize about my choice of words in my immediate reaction but that I maintain that, due to its harmfulness in how it misleads people, expressions of approval for the “great artists steal” cliché should always be reproached.
I did not receive a reply. And some years later, I learned why.
To the extent that the originality-deniers acknowledge that arousal and innovation come from stimuli that combine both familiar and unfamiliar elements, the originality-deniers place emphasis only on the part that is familiar. To the degree that the originality-deniers acknowledge that there is novelty to something, they seek to minimize it as nothing more and nothing better than an Emergent Property to have arisen from what is truly notable: the familiar elements. The most original aspects for them are, at best, a “re-mix” and “good theft” rather than “bad theft.” But to value originality is not to place, as they do, the bulk of the credit on the familiar elements. To value originality is to place attention on, and thus develop appreciation for, the Emergent originality itself.
According to Andrew, Shakespeare could not have created something beautiful and new had Shakespeare not also used literary devices that were not his own invention. Hence, the originality-denier concludes, it is true that “great artists steal.” But we should consider how the word
steal is used here. Even as we recognize that this does not refer to a literal theft that should be punished by law, the “steal” is not flattering to Shakespeare or anyone else. By definition, it implies that Shakespeare does not have complete rightful “ownership” over what has previously been credited as his innovativeness. Praising something backhandedly by calling it “good theft” — an asinine oxymoron — does not cut it.
By contrast, to recognize originality is to face the allegedly-“just cheeky” labels of “stealing” and “good theft” as the belittlement that they are. It is from Shakespeare’s clever combination of familiar elements in a new context that Emerges a form of aesthetic experience that is indeed novel — full stop. No part of the emergent novelty need be diminished by any accusation of “stealing” — not even a mischievous use of that term. Instead, from the novelty of it, Shakespeare earns full “ownership.” Period. To acknowledge and appreciate the existence, occurrence, and importance of creative originality logically requires no more justification than that.
There is an epilogue to the story of Andrew. On Facebook I had been communicating with many people who claimed to have been inspired by Ayn Rand and Objectivism, but I was perturbed by some very creepy cliques that had formed among them. One clique agreed with the white nationalist ravings about a Great Replacement, somehow trying to cite Ayn Rand as if she would have approved of all of that. The other clique was of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.-types who preached against vaccines, GMOs, and any other well-corroborated scientific findings that contradicted their favorite fetishistic beliefs. Because life is too short for all of their melodrama, I Facebook-blocked a lot of members of these two cliques.
Much after my Twitter exchange with Andrew, I had been shown very disturbing screen shots. Members of both the white-supremacist clique and health-fad clique had come together and formed a whole club dedicated to airing grievances against me for Facebook-blocking them. I was shown one Facebook thread in particular. In retrospect, it might sound unsurprising that white nationalists and RFK Jr.-types would be getting together, as both groups are prominent in MAGA. But this alliance occurred before the discovery of COVID-19 and before vaccine-denialism became a prominent part of the MAGA movement. Amid the grievances against me from the RFK Jr.-types and the white nationalists, in that thread I saw one familiar name in particular. It was Andrew. Andrew said he was relieved that other Objectivists have learned the unflattering truth about Stuart. He mentioned having learned first-hand that Stuart is an “ass” — his exact word — and, upon learning that, he blocked me immediately on Twitter.
That is why he never saw my apology to him. And this is the guy participating in this hate-fest about how
I am the one who is too quick to write other people off. Upon seeing that, I can tell you that far from being made to feel remorse over having Facebook-blocked these cliques, I was reminded of why I had Facebook-blocked them in the first place. And I had much less reason to feel sad about Andrew having blocked me over Twitter.
I don’t know if Andrew is still interested in Ayn Rand’s writings. But I do know that this guy knew how to hold a grudge. That exchange over Twitter haunted me as well — it continues to do so — but for reasons different from Andrew’s. I had been blissfully under the impression that someone enthused and gushing over Ayn Rand and
The Fountainhead would have enough appreciation of originality’s importance to understand how degrading it is when people smugly repeat “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
That even people who proclaim love for Howard Roark have such little respect for his defense of originality, was, for me, a rude awakening.
But Andrew would say I’m just rude.
And that was not a fluke. Not long after — though it did not result in as much long-term animus — I had yet another, similar encounter.
There was a raspy-voiced European whom I had met face-to-face in Hawaii and with whom I continued to communicate over Facebook. He, too, said he was inspired by Ayn Rand and was all about free-enterprise philosophy. But, creepily, this European wanted me to be open-minded toward Murray Rothbard and his anarcho-“capitalism.” Being swept under the rug was acknowledgment of Rothbard’s
long record of sleazy behavior.
The European had known from my previous Facebook posts that I valued the principle of originality. He had already seen how greatly I worried about this trend, existing even among self-proclaimed free-market advocates, of denying the existence of, and necessity for, originality. One day, not directly solicited by me or anyone else, he posted a YouTube video on my Facebook wall. The video was a documentary about how many artworks praised as innovative actually rely on the revival of older traditional methods. The documentary’s creators did not mean that the incorporations of these traditions diminished the new artwork’s importance but instead strengthened it. But the European was, like the intellectual blog that quoted Mark Twain, more interested in scoring points for the originality-denial side.
He told me that this showed that “Nothing is truly new.”
I got snippy and replied, “That’s right. Automobiles weren’t new in Germany in the late 1800s. People have always had them, even in the caveman days.”
The European didn’t seethe to the extent that Andrew did, but he still was not amused. In his reply he just restated that every artwork that is praised as innovative actually incorporates traditional conventions and therefore he is correct that nothing is truly new.
The European is invoking the same logical fallacy as Mark Twain in the passage that the intellectual blog quoted. I learned about the logical fallacy’s formal name from Raymond C. Niles, and it is called the Composition Fallacy. A Composition Fallacy occurs when someone notices a characteristic of a particular part of
X and then presumes that the characteristic applies to
X overall. For example, an automobile has parts made out of plastic. It would be a Composition Fallacy to conclude from this that the entire car is made of plastic. Likewise, every normal functioning human eye still has blind spots. It would be a Composition Fallacy if someone concludes that this means that no human eye is capable of sight. And a similar fallacy is employed in the citation of original works’ conventional aspects to deny originality
per se.
The assumptions of Mark Twain and the European not being valid, the presence of conventional aspects in an artwork or invention do not negate the aspects that are novel.
Now one might ask if I am engaging in the same Composition Fallacy as that European but in reverse. If an artwork has parts both conventional and unconventional, and it would be a fallacy to say that only one of those elements characterizes the entire artwork, then who am I to conclude the reverse of the European: that this artwork is not all-old-and-conventional but instead all-original? But I am not saying that the artwork is all-original. What I am saying is that the original aspects are important, and that this novelty added by the creator deserves to be recognized accordingly. Moreover, even if only a small fraction of an artwork is original, that already disproves 100 percent the clichés that “Nothing in art is truly new” and that originality is but a “myth.” And it demonstrates, in spite of Steve Jobs’s misquotation, that an artist has alternatives other than “copying” and “stealing.” There is a possibility of creating something that transcends all of its inspirations, as opposed to there being only this false dichotomy of “good theft” versus “bad theft.” James Clerk Maxwell’s proposition of the existence of airwaves, for instance, was built upon many other valid and excellent discoveries. And yet this proposition itself was so transcendent as to be something new in and of itself.
And there is a related argument, which we shall touch upon later in this essay. It goes like this:
Everything in art is a copy of other art. The movie Pretty Woman copied the musical My Fair Lady, based on a George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, which itself was copied from the Greek myth of the same name. Therefore, no work of fiction has ever been one of originality.
This is similar to how Rothbardian IP-haters blur the distinction between general ideas for a category of product versus their very specific implementation. When I said that Jack Northrop was right to
patent his “flying-wing” structure for airplanes, it has been common for Rothbardian libertarians to spew, “Who is Jack Northrop to gain a monopoly on the market for airplanes?” Jack Northrop patenting his “flying-wing” structure did not grant him a monopoly on the manufacture of airplanes; it granted him a “monopoly” on the very specific blueprints, schematics, and delineation for a sort of airplanes dissimilar from other airplanes.
Likewise, it is not a copy when one work of fiction is inspired by the general premise of another. Originality is found in the specifics. There are many specifics in the movie
Pretty Woman that make it distinct from
My Fair Lady and the Pygmalion myth. Just as an artwork using some conventions does not deny all its originality, the same goes for it sharing an older work’s entire general premise. The new artwork being distinct on specifics is sufficient for it to be recognized as original. And, even as it shares similarities with older works, the degree to which the new work deviates from the old tropes and old premise is the degree to which it gains potential for a groundbreaking originality. One does not have to give any backhanded compliments about something being a competent “re-mix”; one can simply appreciate that there are aspects that are original.
Over the years I have reflected upon the aforementioned exchanges with self-proclaimed admirers of the ideas of Ayn Rand, exchanges that bewildered and saddened me. That so many people who claim to revere
The Fountainhead have recited to me the straw-man attack on originality has taught me the grimmest of lessons. It is that people claiming to revere a book that extols the virtues of originality does not translate necessarily to them valuing those virtues. Such people conveniently gloss over how the book itself had anticipated and rebutted the very straw-man argument they confidently recite. Again,
The Fountainhead points out that works of originality do rely on some conventions, and that, more importantly, the presence of those conventions does not invalidate the aspects that are original. Again, Roark notes that the conventions that the innovator learns “from others is only the end product of their thinking” whereas the “moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step.” It is that “next step” that is the originality and which belongs to the innovator, not the predecessors from whom the innovator has learned.
The originality-deniers are also answered in
Atlas Shrugged. In inventing his new alloy, Rearden Metal, Hank Rearden relied upon the inventions of those who had preceded him in time, such as blast furnaces. On account of that, churlish James Taggart
tells a young woman named Cherryl Brooks,
He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he? . . . Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands of other people. [Sounds like Mark Twain.] His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything [emphasis in book].
To that, Cherryl tells him, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make the Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”
That these originality-deniers are refuted by what they have proclaimed to be a favorite book of theirs makes it seem as though they and I have not read the same book. When Andrew read that exchange between James Taggart and Cherryl, apparently he didn’t get as much out of it as he should have.
Atlas Shrugged is itself highly original in its premise. The premise is distinct from alleged literary precursors, Garet Garrett’s
The Driver and Ernest Bramah’s
The Secret of the League. It was, and is, common for people to say that entrepreneurs are just parasites on their employees — that if their personnel walked out on them, the entrepreneurs would be helpless.
Unlike The Driver and
League and any other books,
Atlas Shrugged dramatizes what would happen if it was the innovative entrepreneur who walked out, going on strike against an ungrateful society.
Besides it being another repetition of the clichés to deny originality, the exchange with the European lingered with me for another reason. The European was very obviously wrong about how there was never anything “new” in the history of art — even ten seconds of thought should have shown him the illogic of that conclusion. Of course there had to be “firsts” within that chronology — even if the exact instance of a “first” could not be identified — otherwise there would never be any visual forms of artistic media other than cave paintings and rock sculptures.
Still, there was an aspect to this where I found myself feeling inadequate in how informed I was. Prior to this exchange, I had not given much thought to the “firsts” in the history of the development of different artistic media. Had the European asked me for examples of “firsts” in the history of art, I would not have been able to cite, with confidence, many case studies.
That brings me to a matter that especially motivated me to write this essay. In the years since that exchange, I have looked into the history of innovation in artistic media. Even when historians cannot identify with confidence the exact party to have originated a particular artistic style or method, the very fact that the artistic style or method now exists — when there was a time when it had not — necessarily presupposes that some party had to be the first to practice it. Again, there can be no trend of change, advancement, or innovation without that trend having been initiated. And in that initiation is the originality.
Still, historians have often found strong evidence by which they can state with confidence that some specific person is the earliest-known — known among these scholars — to have made use of a particular method or style. Hence, I want the rest of this essay to be a litany of examples of innovation in artistic media. When it comes to more-recent developments — that is, from the twentieth century onward — I can even name particular persons as the ones who plausibly may have been the first to have tried a specific style or method.
It is true that sometimes historians name one pioneer, Mr.
Y, as likely the first person to have dabbled in a style or method, only later to learn that he had been chronologically preceded by Mr.
X, even if Mr.
X’s attempts were cruder or less practicable in comparison. As I mentioned earlier, originality-deniers are fond of citing such instances as proof not only that the style’s or method’s “first” practitioner can never be identified, but that this inability to identify such a person also proves that there cannot be one true originator — and, by extension, there should be no intellectual property rights. I often spoke, face-to-face, with a Rothbardian economics professor
who would make that sort of manipulative point in debate.
Notwithstanding the logical fallacies of the originality-deniers, the psychological phenomenon of artistic originality is not delegitimized by it turning out that Mr.
Y had been preceded in some form by Mr.
X. Rather, enthusiasts of art history can still appreciate and credit Mr.
Y for being a pioneer, a relatively early practitioner of the style or discipline, and they can also acknowledge Mr.
X as having been a predecessor, even if Mr.
X’s versions were simpler than Mr.
Y’s. And that logic still applies if it turns out Mr.
X was preceded by Mr.
W, who in turn was anticipated by Mr.
V, and on and on. The fact that there had been “firsts” remains; the fact of originality remains. And, not to be fooled by the enemies of patent rights, the fact that our modern versions of products did not emerge in the complete form by which we know them today, but instead took that form through gradual increments by separate inventors over decades, does not alter that fact either. Gainsaying the assumptions of the originality-deniers, the matter does not have to be any more complicated than that.
With that in mind, in my history of innovation in art, I will be giving some examples of possible “firsts.” I can name, for example, the earliest known-by-historians example of an American-made fiction-narrative jungle-safari movie.
“All of These ‘Firsts’ in Art Relate to Changes in Technology, But Not to Basic Ideas Like ‘Love’ and ‘Heartbreak,’ So There’s No Originality After All”
But before providing my litany of case studies, I should make special mention of how many of the innovations in style and method are largely the result of advancements in technology. One might say, “Even if the technologies through which art is presented do change, the fundamental ideas conveyed in art, such as love and grief, have been constants since the Stone Age. Therefore, when it comes to the fundamentals, the most basic themes in art have remain unchanged. Hence, there really is nothing of importance in art that is new or original.”
But such an objection is shortsighted. Note that this argument is largely a restatement of the one insisting that if newer works of fiction share the same general premise of older works — ignoring the many differences in specifics — then it means there has never been originality in any works of fiction. Marshall McLuhan disabuses us of such a misconception by pointing out, “The medium is the message.” That is, the type of artistic medium — say, dance versus painting —influences the specific manner in which the ideas are conveyed. And the very manner in which the ideas are conveyed, influences the overall experiences and thereby the manner in which the ideas are processed. This allows for greater diversity and sophistication in which ideas are transmitted.
Furthermore, as societies grow accustomed to changes in technology, it allows for the telling of stories with plots that previously would have hardly been comprehensible to their intended audiences. Consider the motion picture
You’ve Got Mail. This is the story of two rival brick-and-mortar bookstore owners, each of a different sex. On account of their business rivalry, they hate each other. Yet in the privacy of their own homes they log onto the World Wide Web and e-mail one another anonymously, using usernames. And each of these people fall in love with the other’s online persona.
That movie is based on earlier works. They are a play, talkie movie, and musical movie — respectively,
Parfumerie (1937);
The Shop Around the Corner (1940); and
Good Old Summertime (1949). As these productions took place prior to there being a World Wide Web, naturally they are about a different technology. In these versions, the two romantic leads are co-workers who dislike one another in their everyday face-to-face encounters. However, again privately in each of their respective separate homes, they correspond by snail mail. In writing their love letters, they do not use their real names.
Even though the communication/information technology that is used as a plot device is different,
You’ve Got Mail and
Parfumerie have the same general premise. That may initially seem to be evidence that technological leaps cannot change the basics of the plots of fiction. But consider the Stone Age when all human societies were hunter-gatherer clans.
It was not only that there was no postal service, but there was a point in history, prior to agriculture replacing hunter-gathering as the main source of food, when people did not live in huts separate from one another. At this point, there was little distinction between “family” and “society”; the entire clan was a family unit in that most of its members were related genetically, not far removed from one another. (Although people did not know consciously about genetic diversity, genetic diversity was maintained when different clans came into contact and swapped spouses.) Except for shamans conducting their rituals in caves surrounded by cave paintings
that seemed to be animated by firelight, most people had much less privacy then than they did upon the emergence of city life. And this was prior to written language.
It was not as though someone could produce an anonymously-authored document expressing one’s love for someone else and then, within the confines of privacy, have that document delivered to that object of amorous intent. These ancient hunter-gatherers already were telling stories around a fire at night — often the shaman was the storyteller — and some of these were love stories. But for ancient hunter-gatherers who had only encountered other hunter-gatherers, a love story such as
You’ve Got Mail would be incoherent. The plot is understandable to us — even if we do not find the movie entertaining — not only because of changes in technology, but also as a result of the extent to which our society has grown accustomed to those changes.
For such reasons, it is legitimate to say that when artists use new technologies to express themselves, the new technologies allow for new ideas to be explored. They also allow for old general-ideas to be examined from new angles, resulting in new specific-ideas. Accordingly, new styles and artistic methods resulting from technological changes do influence both the presentation of ideas and the ideas presented. In short, when changes in artistic styles and methods were mostly the result of progress in technology, the objection that they do not count as innovations in art-as-such does not pass muster. Insofar as an innovation in artistic style or method resulted mostly from advancements in technology, that is still an innovation-in-the-arts
per se.
Moreover, even when the ideas are old, there are “firsts” in terms of how the old ideas are presented in new artistic media. As I type this, the earliest-known written use of first-person pronouns is in a work of art. It is a poem and chant from Enheduanna, an ancient Mesopotamian princess and high priestess. She speaks both for herself and other citizens of their Akkadian city-state in praying to a goddess.
The early history of written and performed artworks in the Bronze Age was tied to civics: these artworks were overseen directly by the leader of the society and were promoted as advancing the society as a whole. That was a norm even for pre-agricultural clans. Often dances and story-tellings were performed by people publicly — not that privacy, again, was much of an option back then — in a manner intended to promote the interests of the community. Examples would be rituals said to have honored the gods and spirits so that they would shower good fortune upon the community.
The ancient Greek lesbian poetess Sappho exemplified something that, in comparison to most of the human history that preceded her, was quite new. She and other Greek poets began to write, on parchment, poems expressing their own personal feelings. No longer was verse confined only to public rituals of civic importance; it
could also be for one’s private personal reflections and satisfaction. Moreover, Sappho deployed a sort of stanza that archaeologists have not found to be employed by her known predecessors in poetry. It consists of three long lines and then a short line. Because this is unseen in known forebearers, this is called a “Sapphic stanza.”
Yes, people had already felt love and physical attraction for millennia prior to Sappho. But being able to write on paper — a then-relatively-new technology — within the privacy of a walled-up enclosure definitely helped Sappho express those ancient emotions in a manner that was new. Even if future archaeologists discover that she was not the first poetess to do this, she was one among a relatively small number of participants in an innovative trend. Love and romantic attraction were not new, but the manner in which this new artistic movement had explored and articulated these feelings was indeed new and original.
Mindful of that consideration, let us get on with the survey. I hope such a survey, though far from exhaustive, will expose to readers the absurdity of insisting that there is no originality, that nothing in the history of art has ever truly been new.
And so it begins.
Theories on How Cave Paintings and Cave Sculptures Were Invented
I have said that if it were true that there was no innovation in the arts, then there would be no form of visual media other than cave paintings and rock sculptures. But I must acknowledge that cave paintings and rock sculptures themselves were innovations. There was once a day in antiquity when there were hominins but no cave paintings or rock sculptures. And then at some point, cave paintings and rock sculptures did exist. Someone had to invent them.
Social scientists such as Izzy Wisher
have a theory on how this may have happened. Psychologists recognize a phenomenon called
pareidolia. It is when you look at one sort of object, and patterns of shade or color or shape in it remind you of an entirely different sort of object. It is pareidolia, for instance, when you look at a cloud and say that its shape resembles that of your cat.
The theory is that pareidolia played a role in inspiring the first figurines and first cave paintings. According to the theory, some ancient person saw a formation of rock in a cave and thought it already resembled a person or animal, such as a bull. However, it occurred to this person that the formation could be reshaped further. Hence, the person carved and reshaped the rock formation to become an even stronger likeness of the person or animal. These would become the first statues and figurines.
Something similar happened with cave paintings. Some ancient humans noticed that different types of rock come in different colors. They noticed that images could be made on the wall of a cave by smearing, onto the wall, wet clay or sticky dust particles from a different sort of mineral. At some point, they saw markings already existing on the cave wall and, again, pareidolia took effect. Of the markings already present, some already looked like people or animals. Once again, they smeared other types of mud and dust onto the markings to alter them, making them into more well-defined representations.
Archaeologists and anthropologists have various theories about these cave paintings. One is that they were made for private rituals carried out by shamans — also what would be called “witch doctors” or “medicine men.” The shaman may have believed that an image of a particular sacred animal had captured its supernatural power. As I said in the discussion of
You’ve Got Mail, the shaman may have prayed to the cave painting. Some theorists
argue that cave paintings reached a point of sophistication such that, when the shaman lit the cave’s interior with a small fire, the cave wall’s images were painted in such a manner that the dancing of the firelight upon the cave images had created the illusion that the cave painting’s objects — the people and animals — were themselves moving with the firelight.
Even in the case of the first cave paintings, the innovation has identifiable traits that are well-established and those that are novel. The already-familiar traits are the already-existing markings and rock formations that, through pareidolia, immediately called to mind some humans or particular animals. The novelty was in the choice of humans to take the initiative in altering the markings and rock formations further to attain the results they wanted.
Ancient figurines and statues of women have shapes that, today, we would not associate usually with feminine nudes. The ancient statues of women have very decidedly pear-shaped torsos. And they are not life-sized. From this, we can segue into a discussion of innovation in sculpture in Hellenic and Hellenistic culture.
Dianne Durante’s History of Innovation in Western Sculpture
A good survey of innovations in sculpture in ancient Greece is that of art historian Dianne L. Durante in her book
Innovators in Sculpture and
Medium series
Art History Through Innovators: Sculpture.
She lets us know from the start that only a tiny percentage of ancient Greek sculptures that have existed have survived to this day and have been recovered. For that reason, it is difficult to identify with confidence who were the earliest artists to have used a particular method. Still, the general century and sometimes even the general decade in which a new method has been spotted to appear — and some specific sculptors associated with that method — can still be named.
Ms. Durante starts with the Bronze Age. This was not something Durante mentioned in particular, but this was a time when Mesopotamians erected statues of deities with the heads of men and the bodies of winged animals. Ms. Durante begins with a culture which had important contact with these Mesopotamians, that of Bronze-Age Egypt. Starting from around 3000 BCE, one can find the earliest examples of a particular innovation. The Egyptians produced their first realistic life-sized statues of men. The hair looked very stiff, as if the hair was a hat instead. The arms were always to the sides and there was no space of separation between them and the torso. The left foot was usually farther forward than the right, and the legs were usually unseparated from a larger slab that kept the figure standing.
I will say something that is not a point in Ms. Durante’s history. That the ancient Egyptians provided this and other Bronze Age innovations — such as Egyptians inventing geometry for commercial reasons — is unsurprising in consideration of how Egypt and Babylon were freer than most other human societies of their time. Archaeologists have found that the pyramids were built not by Hebrew slaves but by free Egyptians. Many of those laborers had farmed for most of the year and sought employment in constructing the pyramids in the seasons when the Nile flooded and made farming impossible. Egyptians sought this employment voluntarily and they were well-paid. The items that accompanied their burials indicate that Egyptian rulers thought well of these people and that they were high-status.
Egypt’s relative freedom also possibly led to the development of the alphabet. Canaanites voluntarily migrated to Egypt for work. Even when the pay was low compared to that of the native-born citizens, it paid more than the sort of work in the place of origin left behind. These Canaanite immigrants were, in that regard, similar to many of today’s migrant workers to the USA and other Western countries. These Canaanites found work in Egypt’s turquoise mines. They were able to observe the religious rites of the wealthy Egyptians who employed them. These Egyptians included the use of hieroglyphs in their ceremonies as Canaanite employees gaped in awe.
Aspiring to be like their employers, at first the Canaanite miners tried to emulate these rituals. When it comes to innovation, the visual similarity to hieroglyphs can be called the familiar part. But these Canaanites had a limitation the wealthy Egyptians did not — they were still illiterate. Hence, according to Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser, these Canaanites produced pictograms visually similar to the Egyptians’ but without the same meaning.
Over time, though, each pictogram came to be associated not with an entire word but just a specific sound. That was the part that was novel. Unable to understand the written language of others, these Canaanites developed their own from the bottom-up. These former illiterates had taught themselves to read through a most unexpected method — inventing their own form of writing. For almost all of the consonants known today, each was represented by a visual symbol that was a modified and simplified version of an Egyptian pictograph.
The Bronze Age economic collapse led to a decline in the business activity that made use of cuneiform writing. As the Canaanites brought about economic recovery in their own trading, their heavy use of their own alphabetic writing had supplanted the cuneiform format that had previously dominated Eurasia. Those Canaanites’ descendants, the Phoenicians, undertook a prodigious amount of trading, including with the Greeks. From the Phoenicians' documents of their trades with the Greeks, Greek merchants learned the alphabet. But the Canaanite/Phoenician alphabet consisted only of consonants. It was the Greeks who added the vowels we use today.
Returning to Ms. Durante’s history, she mentions that there was not much change in the Egyptian sculptors’ conventions until 300 BCE. Durante makes it a point to mention how this means there was relatively little change in 2,700 years. And just as was the case with the use of the alphabet, in realistic life-sized statues of men we find another instance of something that began in Egypt and which was developed further by the ancient Greeks.
Even when the new ideas did not arrive via Phoenician middlemen, Egyptians initially influenced the ancient Greeks in the Bronze Age and then into the Iron Age. But for the Iron-Age Greeks, innovation in sculpture occurred at a much more rapid pace. In particular, Durante focuses on the evolution of the Greek kouros — idealized statues of young male nudes. They appeared around 600 BCE, and at first they closely resembled the Egyptian statues. The torsos and hair styling were similar, and once again the left foot was farther forward than the right. But besides the kouros being nude instead of in a man’s skirt, there were some other important differences. Though the arms were still at the sides, the elbows and forearms had space between them and the torso. The figure stood without a large backboard, and the musculature was more defined.
By 450 BCE — 150 years later — Greek sculpture had already seen dramatic advancement. By this point, the Iron Age, sculptors were making use of a scientific principle that modern Italian practitioners call contrapposto. This refers to how, as someone stands, the weight being placed upon one part of the body causes the shoulders and hips to shift their position accordingly to maintain balance. Many of the statues from the fifth century BCE applying that principle are attributed to the sculptor Polycleitus.
In the earlier part of the fifth century BCE, there was another technological innovation. Sculptors did not always have to rely on stone. They had learned the technique of Middle-Easterners in casting life-sized figures in bronze. The advantage was that bronze was easier to shape. From the 440s to 430s BCE, Pheidas carved statues where there was much detail. When the statues depicted clothed figures, he made realistic pleats in their clothing. The facial expressions of these statues, though, were always neutral.
In the 300s BCE, there was another new trend, this one exemplified by Praxiteles and Lysippus. Prior to the works of these two men, ancient Greek statues were carved with the intention of having been seen mostly from the front. Even when the sculptors first exercised the principle of contrapposto, the statues were posed in such a manner that all of the important details of the action in the pose could be taken in from the front view. By contrast, Praxiteles and Lysippus caved important details in the statue from every angle. An onlooker would have to walk in a circle around the piece to observe every pertinent feature. Lysippus’s details were so precise, as well, that he could carve what historians and archaeologists suspect were very accurate likenesses of real people. The most famous bust of Aristotle is attributed to him. One may note the precision of detail in the subtle wrinkles in Aristotle’s face and in the minute separation of hairs in his beard.
Around the 350s BCE, Scopas added something new: nuanced facial expression. In contrast to Pheidas’s statues always having neutral faces, Scopas used the subtle shapes of the eyelids and curves of the lips to convey a variety of emotions, such as trepidation and sorrow.
By the 200s BCE in the Roman Republic, there was greater variety in the sort of figures presented. No longer was the medium confined to images of idealized men. Sculptors produced representations of elderly women and of small children. They also tried to produce accurate representations of the clothes of foreigners with whom Greek and Roman merchants came in contact.
It has become fashionable for intellectuals to proclaim that it is a myth that there was a “Dark Age” in Western Europe in the duration separating the fall of the Western Roman Empire versus the early years of the Renaissance. Nonetheless, there is a noticeable economic decline in this location and duration. That definitely applies when assessing the degree of sophistication in Western European sculpture throughout the ages. The archaeological record evinces that it was not until around the 1400s CE with artists like Donatello that the old Greek and Roman methods were recovered.
Ms. Durante goes on further in her survey to note of the Renaissance bringing about a new attitude and appreciation for sculptors that was less apparent in Western Europe’s early Middle Ages. But here I will conclude my own essay’s heavy reliance on Ms. Durante’s history. There are more-recent case studies in innovation in artistic method.
Firsts in the History of Motion Pictures
The term
lost media refers to artworks and other information-technology documents that are considered “lost” to posterity because there are currently no units of them known to remain. The fact that, as Ms. Durante has noted, the vast majority of ancient Greek and Roman statues ever to have existed no longer do is a fact that puts them in the category of “lost media.” Likewise, most of the earliest documented-to-have-existed motion-picture prints shown in theaters have been lost, destroyed over time by the elements. However, thanks to many journalistic accounts still available, it is easier to find contenders for possible “firsts” in filmmaking than it is with ancient sculpture.
The first motion pictures shot in the United States came not from California but from the East Coast. New Jersey was home to Thomas Edison’s endeavors, and in Chicago there was another pioneer whose name is now little-known today, despite his being honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was Col. William Selig, a stage magician turned filmmaker. In his biography subtitled
The Man Who Invented Hollywood, Chapman University historian Andrew Erish
makes the case of Selig’s business likely having been the first one in the USA to attempt several genres and storytelling devices that have since become well-established.
Edison’s movie
The Great Train Robbery from 1903 is considered one of the earliest westerns. But it was shot in New York and New Jersey. Selig’s company was the first to shoot westerns on location in the actual American West with real cowboys and Native Americans. Edison’s
What Happened to Mary from 1912 is thought to be the earliest serial for theaters. But each installment is self-contained, ending with resolution to that episode’s story. There was also the three-part crime drama
Fantomas from France in April 1913. By contrast, Selig’s
The Adventures of Kathlyn, beginning its run in December 1913, is the earliest-known American theater serial in which, except for the final one, every installment ends on a cliffhanger.
Of all motion pictures that are fictional depictions of adventures in jungles, the earliest-known one came from Denmark in 1907. That was
Lion Hunting. The first fiction movie to come from an American company about such a safari arrived in 1909 with Selig’s
Big Game Hunting in Africa.
The earliest-known horror movie
is from France —
The Manor of the Devil by the auteur Georges Méliès. We will return to him soon enough. According to the New York Film Academy, this “three-minute film is complete with cauldrons, animated skeletons, ghosts, transforming bats, and, ultimately, an incarnation of the Devil. While not intended to be scary — more wondrous, as was Méliès’s MO — it was the first example of a film (only just rediscovered in 1977) to include the supernatural and set a precedent for what was to come.” Selig’s company was behind the earliest-known horror movie produced in the USA,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1908. This movie, though, consisted simply of shooting a stage production of the literary classic. The movie even begins
by showing a stage’s curtains opening and, correspondingly, ends with them closing. In 1910 Edison’s company followed that with the first screen adaptation of
Frankenstein. In contrast to Selig’s movie, the scenes of this
Frankenstein were shot in separate locations; it is clearly not confined to a single stage.
Selig’s company also made the USA’s earliest-known feature-length narrative fiction movie,
The Spoilers from 1914.
Around the same time, France had its own stage-magician-turned-filmmaker, whom Selig
adulated. This man was Georges Méliès, our aforementioned auteur behind the earliest-known horror movie. As might be expected by one of the first movie makers to depict ghosts and the Devil, Méliès pioneered various special effects and editing techniques that continue to be employed. As
noted by YouTube filmmaker David Yeaman, Méliès pioneered in such techniques as stop-edits, dissolves, and double exposures.
A stop-edit is done when the movie camera is stationary. It shoots for a little while. Then the filmmaker stops shooting. Between takes, the filmmaker changes something about the objects within the camera’s view. Then the filmmaker starts shooting again. The effect is that, when you watch the movie afterward, it looks as though the change is instantaneous. If you first shoot an object, then stop the camera, remove the object while keeping everything else the same, and then start shooting again, in the playback of your movie it will appear as though the object instantly disappeared into nowhere.
This editing technique is the basis for the stop-motion animation orchestrated by Willis O’Brien in
King Kong, by Ray Harryhausen in
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, and by Phil Tippett with Jabba the Hutt’s rancor monster in
The Return of the Jedi. The puppeteer shoots one frame of his puppet, moves the puppet slightly, shoots another frame in the new position, and so on. The final product onscreen is the illusion that the puppet moves on its own, albeit jerkily.
Retired East Carolina film studies professor James C. Holte
says that by some anecdotal accounts, Méliès may have initially stumbled on his stop-edit technique by accident. As the story goes, Méliès had his camera rolling as he shot a scene out on a real street. A cable car came into view exactly as the film jammed. After unjamming the film Méliès resumed his shooting. At that exact moment, a hearse was in the same area of the shot where the cable car had been. When Méliès watched this reel later, he noticed that it seemed as though the cable car had instantly transformed into a hearse.
As noted before, concerning Heinrich Hertz and airwaves, in the the early twentieth century some people liked to say that beneficial “accidents” happen only to those who have good judgment on what to do about them. Here too, other people in Méliès’s position would have dismissed this optical effect as a defect and moved on. Méliès, by contrast, considered how this optical effect could be employed in his storytelling.
Méliès’s “dissolve” effect entails a similar method. It involves one image gradually fading out as, simultaneously, another image fades in. When everything in the shot is kept the same except for one spot where one object fades out and another fades in, the optical effect is similar to what happens with stop-edits, except the change is slower. This effect has been used in classic Universal monster pictures where the face of Lyle Talbot changes from that of a cleanshaven man to that of a furry Wolf Man. Slow dissolves have also been used with two dissimilar images to represent a passage of time that is longer-term than what actually commences onscreen.
Finally, Méliès pioneered in the use of double exposures. This is when one image is superimposed upon another. When this causes a person to appear see-through, the technique can be used to make that person appear as a ghost.
Innovation continued as the era of silent film gave way to movies in which discernible speech could be heard — “talkies.” And here is an uncontested “first” in cinematic arts. 1927’s
The Jazz Singer was the first feature-length talkie, emitting sounds and speech synchronized to correspond with the events shown in the image moving onscreen.
A very decidedly innovative movie was 1933’s
King Kong, and not merely because of Willis O’Brien’s then-new stop-motion animation. The movie
ushered in the use of a technique called
miniature screen projection, which was itself derivative of another technique that was still new at the time,
rear screen projection.
Kong contains several scenes of the human actors interacting directly with the stop-motion dinosaurs. For many consecutive frames, both the human actors and the dinosaur would be onscreen together and looking at one another. For audiences to find these interactions believable, the movements of both the actors and the dinosaurs would have to be timed to match. Absent of the proper timing, both the human actors and the dinosaurs would seem to be thrashing around randomly unprovoked. To solve this, O’Brien employed rear screen projection and then his own miniature screen projection.
With rear screen projection, the following happens. First the filmmaker shoots a particular snippet of footage. Then the filmmaker shoots the scene onset that is to incorporate that snippet. Behind the objects or actors being filmed at the moment is a glass plate or transparent screen, and behind that glass plate or transparent screen is a movie projector. As this new scene is being shot, the projector projects, onto the glass plate or transparent screen, the snippet of footage that is to be incorporated into the new scene. As the new scene is being shot, the actors in it see the projection of the snippet onto the glass plate or transparent screen and are thereby able to time their movements and lines accordingly.
Even with this method as it was, there were still issues. With
King Kong, it was the humans’ sides of the interactions that were shot first. For Willis O’Brien there remained a discrepancy in the timing: the human actors’ movements were filmed in real time whereas O’Brien had to shoot a single frame of his dinosaur on the miniature diorama set he built, turn off the camera, move the dinosaur slightly, shoot another frame, move the dinosaur again, etcetera. To rectify this, O’Brien 1) invented his own special miniature camera for shooting miniatures clearly and 2) employed the rear-screen projection method in a manner convenient for
his specialized needs.
On O’Brien’s miniature diorama set, behind the dinosaur, was an area where he set up a stretched-out sheet of clear rubber. Onto this rubber he projected the snippet of footage of the human actors who were fighting against, or running from, the dinosaur. However, rather than have the snippet play out in real time, O’Brien had the projector project just one frame. He would then move the dinosaur’s body slightly in accordance to where the human actors were and how the dinosaur was to react to them.
With that being done, O’Brien shot his own frame of the dinosaur’s action in relation to where the humans were and what the humans were doing in the corresponding frame from the already-shot snippet. Subsequently, onto the miniature diorama’s stretched-out transparent rubber O’Brien projected the snippet’s next frame of the human actors. Then O’Brien would once again adjust his dinosaur puppet to provide a proper response to the humans’ movements. And then he would shoot that change. O’Brien repeated this rather tedious process until he had a seamless final product in which it looked as though the human actors really could see the dinosaur that was growling at or pursuing them.
Walt Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 marks the earliest-known feature-length cel-animation motion picture.
Finally, you can see innovation and originality in the history of how motion pictures
have used the storytelling device of “flashbacks.” When I saw 1941’s
Citizen Kane, I considered it overrated. However, I did not see it in the same historical context as those who had experienced this movie upon its initial release.
The movie begins with the death of the titular character, newspaper mogul Charles Foster Kane. The story of his life is then told in the form of “flashbacks.” When this movie first arrived in theaters, such a storytelling device was uncommon. The movie employed many such cinematic techniques that, at the time, were relatively unfamiliar. And then it was exactly on account of how groundbreaking
Citizen Kane was, that led to its storytelling devices being used in subsequent movies and thereby becoming commonplace.
In literary fiction, the use of flashbacks was much older. The
Arabian Nights story “The Three Apples” begins with the discovery of the body of a woman who had been slain. Then her killer recounts the events that led to this incident. This was also a relatively early instance of the murder-mystery genre.
The earliest-known example of a motion picture to have a flashback in it was France’s silent film
Histoire d’un Crime in 1901, another crime story. In the USA, D. W. Griffith invoked the technique in 1918’s
Hearts of the World.
The earliest-known “talkie” to have flashbacks was 1931’s
City Streets starring the same lead of the
Fountainhead movie, Gary Cooper. Flashbacks then became more prominent and more frequent eight years later with
Wuthering Heights. Much as with the novel that served as its source material, the
Wuthering Heights film adaptation has the housekeeper Ellen recount what had happened in the past concerning Heathcliff. Most of the French
Le Jour se Lève, or
Daybreak, from that same year was dramatized as a flashback. And then, exactly forty years after a motion picture first employed the method, audiences first became well-acquainted with, and entranced by, flashbacks in
Citizen Kane.
I hope that, by now, these case studies have demonstrated the following.
- Throughout the history of art, there have indeed been instances where someone attempted something that, heretofore in history, had been unprecedented. Hence, in the history of art, there has been much that has been “truly new.”
- Historians and scholars are able to make strong cases that a particular artwork may well be the earliest instance of a particular innovation appearing, or that the artwork is at least the earliest-known instance of that innovation. In many instances where some historical figure has been lauded for introducing something novel, those accolades were indeed well-earned.
A “Great Artist” Is a Second-Mover Who “Stole” the First-Mover’s Relatively New Innovation and Then Put His Own Spin on It?
Prior to concluding this essay, I want to address an alleged second interpretation of “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” According to this second interpretation, the saying is less about denying originality’s existence than it is about highlighting what can be called a Second-Mover Advantage in intra-industry competition.
The idea goes something like this. In the past, many people assumed that the first party to introduce a particular innovation to the marketplace — presumably the original inventor — would have an advantage over all would-be competitors vying to sell similar products. On that understanding, that original innovator would be the “first mover.” But, goes this argument, case studies in the history of business reveal that often the financial success and even acclaim for the innovation go not to that first mover but instead to yet another party, a “second mover.” This other party sells versions of this sort of product when that sort of product is still new, but this party is still not the original innovator.
Consumers come to associate the innovation with that second mover, possibly even assuming the second mover is the true originator. And, when the second mover puts his own spin on the innovation, historians might consider the second mover’s rendition to be superior and more praiseworthy than that of the first. Hence, it is this second mover, not the first, who is considered the “great artist.” This second mover did not necessarily steal anything literally from the first mover, but this second mover did — not always by intention — “steal” credit and accolades that ostensibly should have gone to the first mover instead. Hence, “great artists steal.” That is the conclusion of the argument.
Steve Jobs himself appears in the most famous case study. When the Apple Macintosh hit stores in 1984, for consumers it was revolutionary. It was the first time they used a mouse to maneuver a cursor on what was called a graphical user interface (GUI). As far as many of these consumers were concerned, Apple Computer must have originated this technology. Consequently, consumers saluted Jobs for being a “great artist.” However, this technology was originally developed by Douglas Engelbart, other engineers at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and various universities. Apple Computer did not steal this invention literally; it paid licensing fees to Xerox. However, as Jobs tacitly allowed the public to associate this technology with Apple instead of Engelbart and Xerox PARC, Jobs “stole” their applause.
Similarly, when moviegoers from the late 1930s to early 1940s encountered
Citizen Kane, this was often the first movie they could recall in which the story was told with the framing device of flashbacks. This, among many other attributes of
Citizen Kane, made writer-director-producer-star Orson Welles a “great artist.” Yet, to this day, even many of the most seasoned cinephiles remain unaware that a motion picture had made use of flashbacks four decades prior in
Histoire d’un Crime. In that respect, it might be said that “great artist” Orson Welles “stole” flashbacks from
Histoire d’un Crime.
The word
steal usually has a stigma to it, even when someone like Austin Kleon tries to soften it by calling something a “good theft.” Yet many people who say that the Macintosh’s incorporation of the GUI exemplifies the principle of “Great artists steal” say this not with disapproval toward Steve Jobs but, perversely, a cynical sort of admiration. The insinuation is often “Jobs was not being the most moral person by conventional standards. But in terms of getting all the glory — the same sort of glory I aspire to — Steve Jobs
won. He won to a degree much greater than Douglas Engelbart. And I have to hand it to him there.”
After all, many movie buffs aware of
Histoire d’un Crime will say that
Citizen Kane is still the higher-quality movie. They will say that the higher quality proves that Orson Welles remains a “great artist.” And they will add that they do think he “stole” the flashback motif from
Histoire d’un Crime, meaning that it is true that it is the “great artists” who “steal.”
Even in these cases, I find both the cynicism and the use of the word
steal misleading — even when Jobs spoke it himself. The fact is that Steve Jobs, not Engelbart or Xerox, is the party who took the specific action of moving this economic value through the supply chain to bring it to market and, hence, to consumers. Had Jobs not taken an interest, this technology would have remained stuck in the laboratory, unseen by consumers for many more years. The act of Jobs and Apple having moved this product through the supply chain, from the laboratory to the retail stores, when they did — whereas Engelbart and Xerox did not — is itself an economic value for which Jobs, and not Engelbart, deserves credit. Likewise, we can acknowledge Engelbart, Xerox PARC, and the other university computer scientists for being the parties to have developed the earliest versions of this important technology. There is no inevitable conflict there.
It was in
an interview for Robert X. Cringely’s PBS documentary series
Triumph of the Nerds where Steve Jobs first told the public that his motto was “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” In that interview, the context was that Jobs disclosed that he did not want Apple Computer’s personnel to be hobbled by a Not-Invented-Here attitude. That is, Jobs did not want Apple’s engineers to dismiss other companies’ ideas as unworthy of adoption simply for having come from outside of Apple. When Apple’s competitors had objectively good ideas, Jobs said, Apple’s engineers should consider those ideas and apply them when they can.
That is fine, but such incorporation of others’ ideas should apply no more than at the level of the general. Applying the best general ideas of others should not come at the expense of other people’s rightful claims of ownership over their own specific original works. And, as I hope this essay has made clear, those rightful claims of ownership are principles that are moral and reputational, not just legal. Morally, rightful respect for someone else’s intellectual creations extends beyond application in court with the enforcement of patents and copyrights. Rightful ownership, as Howard Roark can attest, also consists of crediting the innovation’s originator and recognizing that originator’s moral authority in exercising control over her original presentations and designs. When Steve Jobs says that great artists such as himself do “steal,” it seems to be an inadvertent, passive admission that Douglas Engelbart has not received, reputationally, proper due for the Macintosh’s best features.
In his philosophic YouTube video essay “You Are Unoriginal,” Thomas Rebour concludes by
declaring, “It’s arrogant and presumptuous to believe that I deserve to ‘own’ certain ideas.” Yet it is Rebour being presumptuous and pretentious. James Clerk Maxwell does rightfully “own” his postulation of the existence of airwaves. Maxwell owns it not in that other people are to be prevented from learning from the idea. But Maxwell does own it in that we recognize properly the breakthrough in his having taken the initiative to putting all the clues together — and his having done so when even his excellent contemporaries in the study of electromagnetism had not.
Conclusion
That intellectual blog I cited earlier — the one that gleefully quoted Mark Twain, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Miller about “The Myth of Originality” —
also provides a quotation from Steve Jobs that is more nuanced than “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” This time, Jobs says in a 1996 interview with
Wired magazine,
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.
That quotation, much like T. S. Eliot’s original “Mature poets steal” quotation, is nothing better than a mixed bag. And, as with the original quotation by T. S. Eliot, the phrasing is very misleading. Jobs acknowledges that particular individuals — as opposed to society in general — are indeed bringing about “
new things” (emphasis mine) and that these particular individuals are “creative.” The part about “connecting things” refers to the manner in which an innovation, per Aristotle, takes hold of some familiar ideas and conventions and then “connect[s]” them to a new context in which they are unfamiliar.
But then Jobs says these people are “
just connecting things,” the word
just insinuating that this is not the big deal it is made out to be. Lest anyone dispute that he meant to downplay the grandeur of it, Jobs continues that these innovators “didn’t really do it.” That anticipates President Obama declaring to entrepreneurs proud of their own economic value-creation that “You didn’t build that.” This is related to the cliché with which this essay started. If the innovator “didn’t really do it,” then the innovator, despite being a “great artist,” cannot properly take full ownership over her innovation. In that respect, the thinking goes, the innovator’s own innovation is something the innovator “stole,” be it an oxymoronic “good theft” or otherwise.
Innovation indeed involves connecting familiar ideas with unfamiliar contexts, but innovation is not “
just connecting things.” It is
a lot. As Ayn Rand observed, the innovator did do something new, and over that novelty, the innovator has the rightful primary claim of full ownership.
There was someone who said something similar to Steve Jobs about
connecting ideas, but did so in a fashion much more accurately and eloquently, and who, thankfully, acknowledged much more overtly how human beings are capable of doing that which is original, unprecedented. It was Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the process by which embryos develop. In December 2016 to a panel of other Nobelists, she
considered,
If you want to be original, not just productive, you have to concentrate and be a little isolated from interchanging constantly with other people and other influences. . . . This “networking” idea that you constantly have to be in contact with other people, I don’t think is the best way. I mean you need to be connected [with others], of course, but you also have to find your own way, and not be constantly asking, “What are the others doing, and what’s coming up there, and what’s coming up there?” I think it’s really important. . . . I think creativity, in a sense, is combining facts which no one else had combined before.
Note Dr. Nüsslein-Volhard’s emphasis on the need for psychological independence. James Clerk Maxwell combined ideas that had not been combined before, and that was only part of his unprecedented insight, his originality.
I said it on Twitter years before, and I say it again: “Good artists copy, great artists steal” is an insipid cliché that needs to go out of circulation. It should go extinct in Silicon Valley and everywhere else. That saying, along with “Originality is a myth” and “Nothing in art has ever truly been new,” are what people say when they are being pretentious.
It is only by the vaguest definitions and the loosest criteria by which someone can say that throughout history no one has truly exercised originality in artistic media. It is merely by defining artwork only by the most crudely-drawn parameters, and by looking at the concepts no more closely than at the most general level, that someone can say that everything in art is a copy of other artwork. But as with the specific designs, delineations, and presentations protected in copyrights and patents, it is the matter that originality in art is defined by specifics. The
Arabian Nights story of “The Three Apples” made use of the flashback motif centuries prior to the silent movie
Histoire d’un Crime doing it. But
Histoire d’un Crime being the earliest-known motion picture to have done it means that
Histoire d’un Crime remains a cinematic “first” and should be remembered as such.
That principle remains in effect even if one judges
Citizen Kane to have executed the flashback motif in a manner more artful, cohesive, and aesthetically pleasing than did
Histoire d’un Crime. Remembering
Histoire d’un Crime for one sort of accomplishment does not take away from
Citizen Kane, and vice versa.
To look at art history and to use logic is to discredit the cliché that in art “Nothing is truly new.” There was a time when there was no motion pictures, let alone motion pictures making use of flashbacks in their storytelling. Now there are many motion pictures that do that. It stands to reason that some party was the first to do it, and, in so doing, thought specific thoughts and took specific actions absent of exact historical precedent. At every increment of creative change and progress, there is something truly new.
Yes, talented artists and innovators do learn from the techniques of others and they do apply those lessons, on a general level, to their own work. By the same token, the history of art and technology is still the history of many developments that, until someone chose to enact them, had been without precedent.
And through proper documentation, often historians are able to find evidence by which they can discern which party was likely the first to do what. By that method, even specific artists who are not as well-remembered as Orson Welles can get their due. These are great artists.
Great artists don’t steal. Great artists originate.
On Sunday, November 9, 2025 around 2:07 a.m., I added the quotation from Todd Kashan about how something is most interesting to you when it is the desired balance between familiar and unfamiliar. On Friday, March 20, 2026, I added the creatio-ex-materia sentences.
