Since reading his book Steal Like an Artist years ago, I’ve found artist and author Austin Kleon’s work to be both calming and inspiring. He has helped me get out of my own way and engage more wholeheartedly in the act of creation. (I even recently made my public doodling debut in his newsletter.)
Austin’s newest book, Don’t Call It Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again, reminded me of a quote I like from D.H. Lawrence:
“Why should I look at my hand, as it so cleverly writes these words, and decide that it is a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it? … My hand is alive, it flickers with a life of its own…and knows a vast number of things.”
Austin joined me to talk about his new book. Our conversation is below.
David Epstein: Early in the book, you write: “I apprenticed myself to beginners.” I love that line. Not only does it have excellent rhythm, it conveys a counterintuitive idea. What did you mean specifically?
Austin Kleon: I genuinely felt like, even though I was the author of several books about creativity, my kids had way more to teach me about being creative than I had to teach them. It was what the artist John Baldessari said: “I learned so much about art from watching a kid draw…. Kids don’t call it art when they’re throwing things around, drawing—they’re just doing stuff.”
Most fatherhood books focus on all the stuff you have to teach your kids. Anytime I tried to teach my kids anything about drawing or making music, it felt like it backfired on me in a big way. So I figured, if I don’t feel like I have anything to teach them, why not make them my teachers? There’s a book by Caroline Pratt from the 1940s called I Learn from Children. One of the secret titles for my book was, I Steal From Children.
DE: Ryan Holiday has told me that my book Range is a “parenting book in disguise.” You mention that Don’t Call It Art can be thought of as a parenting book in disguise. But I actually think it might be closer to the inverse—an adulting book disguised as a parenting book. Agree or disagree, and why?
AK: You’re probably right. I always liked Ryan’s description of your book, and then I was listening to this interview with Fiona Apple one time and she said she reads parenting books even though she doesn’t have kids or want to have kids, because she feels like you always have to learn to parent yourself. The interviewer said, “So, you’re the parent and the child?” And she said, “Well, I mean, you always have to be.”
So that clicked a lightbulb on in my head. Every great artist, I think, has this unique blend of child and adult in them. Saul Steinberg said he was just a kid who never stopped drawing. Adults struggling to make art often have the problem that they have too much adult in them and not enough child. I thought maybe you could write a book about how to parent yourself so that little 4-year-old that’s in you can come out and play.
DE: You write that “trying to make art is the easiest way to keep yourself from actually making art.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
AK: If you think about making art, you start comparing yourself to all the Great Masters, and all the people you look up to who make the art you love, and you can basically psyche yourself out. If you don’t worry about making art — the way little kids don’t worry about making art — you can just make stuff.
“People do much better when they don’t think they’re being artists,” Brian Eno once wrote. “If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.”
DE: Since I’ve written quite a lot about the 10,000-hours rule, I can’t let one of the quotes in the book go unremarked upon. It’s from the cartoonist Gareth Brookes, who says:
“I’ve heard people say that it takes 10,000 hours to master your style or your line or something, but to be honest I think it takes 10,000 hours to become boring and mediocre. The moment you master something is the moment you stop being creative.”
There’s a difficult tension embedded in that quote. I’m guessing that you don’t mean to suggest that working toward mastery is a bad thing. So tell me what you hope people will take from that section of the book.
AK: Working towards mastery isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not the only thing, especially when it comes to creative work. Lots of people act like it’s the only thing and it isn’t — it’s not even necessary! That’s what punk rock taught us: you not only don’t have to master your instrument, you don’t even have to be good! Bernard Sumner of New Order said he saw the Sex Pistols live and he thought they were terrible. “I wanted to get up there and be terrible with them!”
I liked Brookes’ quote because it had that punk rock spirit — the same spirit little kids have. They don’t give a shit about what’s good or being good. They like being bad. So do I. In fact, I make some of my best work when I’m being bad!
I also like how Brookes highlighted the other trouble with mastery, which was aptly expressed by Andre 3000 of Outkast, when he was asked why he’s playing the flute instead of rapping to stadiums: “Mastering shit can get boring. I’d rather go amateur interesting than master boring.”
Every professional, in order to stay fresh and have an edge, has to retain a bit of that amateur spirit that all kids have.
DE: Now I want you to resolve a tension in my work for me—thank you very much. As you know, I wrote a book about the importance of broad experiences and exploration, experimentation, and expanding the surface area of material in your mental database. I also wrote a book about the importance of constraints and how working inside a box can actually power your creativity. You’ve also written about both of these things. How do you explain the tension to people? Asking for a friend…
AK: Well, first off, I don’t think you can resolve a tension, you can only find a proper amount of the tension. I’m a guitar player, so I think of tension in terms of a guitar string: If you tune it up too much, the string is gonna snap. But if you don’t wind the string tight enough, it’ll just buzz. Too much or too little tension and there’s no music.
As far as explaining the tension, I don’t need to because Jack White made a 50-second song about it called “Little Room.” (The White Stripes, btw, are the ultimate “freedom in constraints” band.) I will type it from memory:
Well you’re in your little room
And you’re workin’ on something goodBut if it’s really good
You’re gonna need a bigger room
And when you’re in the bigger room
You might not know what to do
You might have to think ofHow you got started
Sitting in your little room
DE: You write a lot in Don’t Call It Art about the importance of the act of doing, even when (or perhaps especially when) it’s messy. You write:
“We think we need more information, when what we really need is to spend more time figuring things out on our own, fumbling about, exploring, getting lost, playing through our frustrations, and discovering something of our own.”
Naturally, this made me think of AI, and its capacity to reduce our fumbling about by speeding us toward a result. Do you think there are uses of AI that are compatible with the need to fumble about? And do you use AI for anything in your own work?
AK: For the second time in this interview, I will quote my hero, Saul Steinberg: “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
DE: I’m a big fan of scheduling things that aren’t max-productivity work. Literally, on the calendar: “Quiet reading,” or “downtime.” You write that you “schedule playtime for myself. On a regular basis, I block out chunks on my calendar with a start and finish time that are reserved exclusively for play.” Two things: First, do you literally put this on your calendar? Second, how does this time usually look in practice?
AK: I don’t literally put it on my calendar because I hate my boss and I don’t want him knowing what I’m up to. (To be clear: I am self-employed.) But usually what playtime looks like in practice is, “I should really be working on that thing I have to do. I think I’ll goof around with making a poem instead.” Or: “Ah, it’s Sunday — my day off! I think I’ll just poke into the studio and listen to records. Oops I just made a pile of drawings.”
DE: You have so many wonderful super-short stories in the book. One of my favorites is about the ceramics class where the teacher divided students into two groups—one that would be graded on the quality of their work, and one on the quantity. What happened?
AK: That’s a little parable from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s classic book Art & Fear. The students who were told they’d be graded on quantity made all the best pots because they made a lot of pots, and the students who were told they’d be graded on quality produced almost nothing because they were too occupied with trying to make a perfect pot. The parable tells us that if we worry less about making perfect work and just make a lot of work, we’ll make a lot of junk, sure, but we’re also more likely to make something great.
You have to make a lot of mediocre stuff in order to get some winners. This is best illustrated, I think, by my friend Drew Dernavich’s piles of cartoons submitted to The New Yorker:
DE: Last question. This is random, and you’re the first person I’ve tried it on, but I want to start asking it more often: What’s a movie you love that is objectively mediocre (i.e. IMDB rating <6.5)?
AK: Nacho Libre. (IMDB rating 5.9.) I recommend watching it in black and white.
DE: Well played, sir.
Thank you for reading. Don’t Call It Art is hot off the presses.
And my new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, recently became a New York Times best seller. It’s on sale from a variety of retailers. The Wall St. Journal had this to say in its review: “Fascinating stories ... Boxing ourselves in may be the ultimate way to think outside the box.” Thank you to everyone who picked up a copy.
Finally, a Lionel Messi-themed video I made recently took off. You can see that here.
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Until next time…
David
This is all so good. Thank you.
Always such a treat to see a conversation between you two! Thanks, David. Have things settled a bit post book launch or is it still full on?