Creativity Lies: The Originality Lie
The Most Popular Creativity Lie
If everyone’s stealing, should you do it too? Yes.
The quote on the stone in the picture above is popularly attributed to Pablo Picasso, who knew he was a great artist. So the words are an admission of guilt, though no great admission; we all know that Picasso “stole” the African aesthetic and combined it with his European training to make Cubism.
The first sentence from Wikipedia’s definition of “Creativity” labels it as “a phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed.”
Banksy’s hilarious appropriation is a rich riff on both statements. He has managed to openly steal Picasso’s quote about stealing, and make it completely new.
It’s all the richer when you understand that Picasso almost certainly never said these words in the first place, and if he did, he definitely stole them himself. But from whom?
The first “documentation” of “Picasso’s quote” came from our own generation’s greatest idea thief, Steve Jobs, in a 1996 PBS documentary “Triumph of the Nerds.” Jobs actually attributed these words to Picasso: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”
Whatever the exact structure, Jobs’ attribution of the words to Picasso seem…
