Looking at the most-popular blog posts on the Web this weekend, I came across this version of a speech by Austin Kleon, a writer/artist in Austin, Texas, which he titled "Steal Like an Artist."
It's a manifesto for the mash-up era.
An intellectual property lawyer might want to start billing over this one, but Kleon advances the spirit of the re-purposing age in clever, primitive drawings spiced with a Greek chorus that ranges from Jay-Z to Goethe. (I remember taking the El into the loop each morning when I lived in Chicago and making sure I was paying attention when the conductor announced Go-Thee. Sounded more Biblical than Teutonic. But anyway ...)
Kleon gives the sort of advice he wished he'd heard in college, much of it instructive. It's about what to do with your creative life and how to get noticed. A lot of the advice is surprisingly old-school, such as work hard at whatever you're doing.
Here's the part that makes most sense to me, how to draw a real audience for the heart of what you do:
One of the things I've learned as an artist is that the more open you are about sharing your passions, the more people love your art.