The Ethics of Stealing Nicely

How to steal like you mean it (but not enough to get sued)

collage, 2021 - image found in book of found images

I steal. Not from small businesses, not from friends, and not from artists who haven’t been dead long enough. But I do steal. Images, ideas, moods. Concepts. Things I wish I had made. Things I’m not talented or trained enough to make. Sometimes even things I could never do justice to, but still try to absorb and twist until they vaguely resemble something I can call my own.

The truth is, most artists steal. But we’ve developed a whole taxonomy of euphemisms to make ourselves feel better about it. Influence. Reference. Homage. Visual language. And my personal favourite: inspiration.

As Jim Jarmusch once said, “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to.”

There’s a strange etiquette to all of this, and I navigate it with the same kind of overthinking I bring to dinner parties and crowded openings. As a collage artist, I’m strict with what I use. No copyrighted images. No murky origins. I draw a sharp line when it comes to visuals. But ideas? Those are harder to track. And frankly, harder to resist.

You read something, see something, hear a phrase that sticks in your mind, and before you know it, it’s yours. Or at least, it feels like it is. I steal ideas the way some people collect things that aren’t ideas. With enthusiasm, mild guilt, and the certainty that I’ll eventually forget where I got them.

The line between influence and appropriation is not bright and shiny. It’s a greasy smudge. A moving target. It gets even messier when the material you’re borrowing from comes with historical baggage. Cultural appropriation isn’t a footnote here. It’s the whole debate. Who gets to borrow what? And why? Is it ok to use symbols, stories, or styles that aren’t "yours"? Even if you love them? Even if you understand them? Even if you’re not profiting?

The safest answer is often no. But art doesn’t like safe answers. So we squirm. We justify. We build layers of context. We issue statements. Or worse, we just pretend we didn’t notice. I’m not here to moralise. I don’t have a manifesto. I’m not here to clean up the mess, just to admit I’m sitting in the middle of it.

There’s a difference between curiosity and entitlement. Between using something because you love it, and using it because you think you have the right to. And even that difference isn’t always obvious. My rule of thumb? If I’m not sure I can live with the act, I don’t. If I feel a twinge of unease, I listen. If I can’t articulate why it feels wrong, I wait. That doesn’t make me virtuous. It makes me cautious. Which, in the ecosystem of artistic theft, is probably the bare minimum.

Sometimes I look at my own work and realise it’s just a remix of a remix. Someone else’s idea, filtered through my taste, stripped of context and reassembled. But that’s also the magic of it. It’s not just what you take, it’s how you take it. How much you change it. How honestly you admit what you owe.

Good stealing is deliberate. Bad stealing is lazy. And when I steal, I want to be sure I’m doing the former. Not because I think I’m owed the right to rework the world, but because I know I’m already doing it. All of us are. We just pretend otherwise until someone points it out.

So yes, I steal. Nicely. When I can. With caution and with care. It doesn’t make me innocent. But it does make me aware. And I suppose that’s something…