41 pages • 1 hour read
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
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Chapter 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Creativity is Subtraction”
Living in the age of information can easily overwhelm artists. It can be helpful to place restrictions and challenges on creative process: This provides guidelines that ironically allow more freedom in creativity than simply having “limitless possibilities” (137).
Kleon ends his book by reminding readers that “advice can be a vice” (147), and to take what is useful for them.
Chapter 10 Analysis
In this final chapter, Kleon gives some concluding advice about Creativity in the Digital Age based on filtering external advice and information. Much of Kleon’s specific advice here revolves around the details of how to construct a creative practice in the digital age. This chapter acknowledges how overwhelming it can be to live in the “information age.” Kleon’s advice to move away from “limitless possibility” and put restrictions on creative processes ties back to his thoughts on Art as a Genealogy of Ideas in Chapter 1, where he encourages artists to de-center the idea of individual genius for the more communal concept of creative genealogy.
Kleon ends with the suggestion that the reader not be bound too tightly by his advice. This expresses humility, which fosters a likeable persona and also creates an open-endedness to the book as the reader takes their response forward into their own creative space.
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