Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Austin Kleon is the author, illustrator, and authorial voice of Steal Like An Artist. The book is written in a casual, friendly tone and is ostensibly in Kleon’s own voice, as if he were giving a friend advice. Before Chapter 1, he writes that “all advice is autobiographical” and “this book is me talking to a previous version of myself” (1). This accounts for the familiar and friendly tone of Kleon’s writing but also deliberately promotes the premise of the book as autobiographical. Kleon’s focus on art as an iterative process and his engagement with the digital space are influenced by his own experience. Steal Like an Artist started as an invited talk called “How to Steal Like an Artist” for Broome Community College in Binghamton, New York. After the talk, he “edited the slides and [his] speech into a blog post and published it on [his] website” (Kleon, Austin. LitHub, 2022). The blog post went viral overnight, crashing his website and garnering the attention of editors asking if he’d turn the post into a book. When it came to making the book, he practiced what it preaches, “stealing bits and pieces from all over and pulling them together to try to make something new” (Kleon), working in the afternoons and nights after his day job: a practice he advises in Chapter 9. The physical makeup, material, and voice of Steal Like an Artist are reflective of Kleon’s values and practices as a creative individual.

Kleon is a writer and a visual artist. The visual design of Steal Like an Artist indicates a lot about Kleon himself and his artistic priorities and practices as he engages in Creativity in the Digital Age. He wanted the book to look like a zine, which is a self-published unique work of minority interest, usually reproduced via photocopier. Kleon’s interest in this form of art can be traced back to his first book, Newspaper Blackout. Zines are handmade amalgamations of images and words from various sources, re-arranged in creative ways to make something new. In this way, a zine embodies Kleon’s advice to “steal like an artist” (2-3), and his assertion that “every new idea is just a mash-up or a remix of one or more previous ideas” (9). Zines are most often associated with counterculture: Kleon’s emphasis on collective community, Art as a Genealogy of Ideas, and showing “your appreciation without expecting anything in return” (109) is distinctly countercultural. Kleon’s inspiration from the countercultural movement is further emphasized by his purposeful decisions on the book’s design. Each chapter’s headlines and interspersed doodles and lists were “hand-lettered with marker on typing paper and scanned into the computer” (Kleon). He used this hand-lettering to write the names of the ten chapters on the back of the book. This, combined with the fact that Steal Like an Artist was purposefully made into a perfectly square book, “looked to [Kleon] like a tracklist on a CD, which was appropriate, because [he] wanted the chapters to blast in and blast out with the same energy as the songs on some of [his] favorite punk records” (Kleon).

In melding together writing, visual art, and music, the form of Kleon’s book represents how Kleon believes artists should operate in their creative spheres. He relates an anecdote about voraciously songwriting and playing in bands as a teen, and then not playing music for a decade after deciding he “needed to focus on just writing” (71). He warns his readers not to “throw any of [themselves] away” (72) because of an external perception of what type of creative endeavor is worth putting one’s time into. When he focused solely on writing, the “phantom limb pain got worse and worse” (71). Though he does not make money from music, after he integrated a musical practice with friends back into his life, Kleon experienced an increased happiness that was “regenerative. It’s like church” (72). This shows The Difference Between Work and Play in Kleon’s creative practice. While his book is a written and visual form, it still embodies music and other creative modalities of “play” within it.