Great Artists Steal

From Steve Jobs in Triumph of the Nerds, Robert X. Cringely’s 1996 PBS documentary, in the episode named after this line: “Great Artists Steal.” The sentence everyone quotes is the middle of a longer answer about what makes a product good. Jobs frames the work as a matter of taste: “expose yourself to the best things that humans have done” and “bring those things in to what you’re doing.” He ends the same answer by crediting the Macintosh to a team of “musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.” He attributes the saying to Picasso; there is no solid evidence Picasso ever said it, and Quote Investigator traces the idea back through T. S. Eliot to an 1892 remark about poets.

Jobs’s own evidence for what made the Mac great is a team drawn from music, poetry, art, zoology, and history, not a teardown of a competitor’s product. The kind of stealing he refuses to apologize for is taking the best of what people have made in fields that have nothing to do with computers and carrying it into the work. It is a claim about how wide you cast for inputs. A team that only knows computers can only steal from other computers.