41 pages • 1 hour read
Austin KleonSteal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
Austin KleonNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Don’t Wait Until You Know Who You Are To Get Started.”
Kleon proposes that one comes to know who they are through the act of creation. No one should let “imposter syndrome” hold them back, because no one has a concrete sense of “where the good stuff comes from” (28). Instead, he encourages people to “fake it ‘til you make it” (30): to pretend to be an artist until you start making art.
One way to do this is by “copying”: first, copying your heroes, and second, stealing “the thinking behind [their] style” (36). This way, artists are remixing ideas rather than plagiarizing them. By getting into the minds of your artistic heroes, you don’t just mimic the material of their creations but begin to truly understand how to create.
After this type of “imitation,” artists can move on to “emulation,” where artists identify differences from their heroes and “amplify and transform” (41) them into their own work.
Chapter 2 Analysis
Kleon continues to give advice for how artists can reframe the ideas they have about making art and conceptualize Art as a Genealogy of Ideas. Following the general re-framing of how readers think about art and creativity, this chapter provides pointed advice for how individuals can identify what they want to “steal,” and use that as a jumping off point for developing their own place in the artistic community.
Inner confidence is crucial to Kleon’s message here. His first directive is to shed the constraints that “imposter syndrome” puts on the creative process. The feeling that someone is an imposter in a certain setting or profession makes them feel like “you really don’t have any idea what you’re doing,” when in fact very few people “know where the good stuff comes from” (28). This idea flows from the previous chapter’s discussion on swapping individualism for community. His message of “stealing” is a solution to creative block. He encourages the reader by acknowledging that the pressure to create something new, professional, and perfect out of nothing can be paralyzing. Instead, Kleon proposes that it is “the act of making things and doing our work” (27) that helps artists realize what they want to make and who they are in the wider artistic community. This again supports the concept of art as an iterative process.
Kleon proposes two practical pathways for people to begin this process, quoting a famous monologue from William Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players” (29). In drawing on Shakespeare, Kleon shows in practice how Art as a Genealogy of Ideas functions, drawing on one of his artistic heroes to support his argument. Kleon also cites two historical examples of those commonly considered artistic geniuses who began their careers by copying: The Beatles and Salvador Dalí. In both cases, these artists openly declared their debt to the artists they copied through their careers. This last point is significant because acknowledging influence is crucial to the ethical production of art, as well as to the intentional nature of Kleon’s message. In making this point, he treads a balance between ethical artistic influence and unethically “stolen” or derivative art. It is important that the reader understands “steal” in a facetiously disruptive sense, not as a license to act fraudulently.
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