text: Theater Around The Bay: They say that "Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal" , but like…don't actually Steal Stuff, that is Bad « San Francisco Theater Pub
  Sep7 by sftheaterpub
  This entry was posted in Theater Around The Bay and tagged Annie, Art, artists, CAA, comedy, Comedy Central, Gawker, Instagram, Internet, Jessie Eisenberg, Josh Ostrovsky, Oliver Twist, Peter Hsieh, plagiarism, plays, rant, Rolling Stone, Social Media, Theater, Theater Around The Bay, theatre, Thefatjewish, theft.
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  One comment on "Theater Around The Bay: They say that "Good Artists Borrow, Great Artists Steal" , but like…don't actually Steal Stuff, that is Bad"
  Stuart here. I think it's important to recognize that there is a nuance to the "Good artists borrow; Great artists steal" slogan that is kind of lost on many people. Borrow and steal aren't being used in reference to copyright or signed work/content here, but rather in connection to ideas or styles that artists "borrow/steal" from one another and then proceed to comment or expand on, or deconstruct in a way that results in new work that is markedly individual- a unique perspective- if not original (it's arguably impossible to be truly original since we live in an intertextual society that builds upon itself). What Ostrovsky does is flat out plagiarism, where his taking someone else's content and reproducing it without alteration, or credit to the originator, and passing it off as his own. That's a completely different thing from parody, satire, sampling, variation, or any other number of legitimate artistic recreation/revisioning that might or usually does include content by another creator.