"That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it"
About this Quote
Foss is picking a fight with our favorite moral shortcut: calling artistic influence "theft" as if a melody and a wallet occupy the same ethical universe. The line works because it refuses the courtroom framing. Stealing is measurable, prosecutable, obsessed with the before-and-after ledger: quantity taken, victim named, loss proven. Foss flips the accounting. Art, he argues, is judged by transformation, not extraction; the relevant question is not provenance but alchemy.
The subtext is a defense of modern composition in a century that made originality feel both mandatory and impossible. Foss came of age when Stravinsky had already turned quotation into high art, when jazz and popular song were bleeding into concert halls, when recordings made every style instantly available, and when postwar avant-gardes policed "newness" with near-religious zeal. In that climate, accusations of borrowing could be aesthetic criticism dressed up as ethics: not just "this resembles that", but "you failed the purity test."
Foss doesn’t deny that artists take. He insists the taking is the baseline condition, not the scandal. What separates homage from hackwork isn’t whether you raided the past; it’s whether you paid it back with interest. The composer’s obligation is not to pretend to be untainted, but to metabolize what’s heard - to make influence audible as invention.
It’s also a quiet swipe at ownership culture: the impulse to reduce creativity to property disputes. Foss asks us to listen less like auditors and more like readers of intent, craft, and consequence.
The subtext is a defense of modern composition in a century that made originality feel both mandatory and impossible. Foss came of age when Stravinsky had already turned quotation into high art, when jazz and popular song were bleeding into concert halls, when recordings made every style instantly available, and when postwar avant-gardes policed "newness" with near-religious zeal. In that climate, accusations of borrowing could be aesthetic criticism dressed up as ethics: not just "this resembles that", but "you failed the purity test."
Foss doesn’t deny that artists take. He insists the taking is the baseline condition, not the scandal. What separates homage from hackwork isn’t whether you raided the past; it’s whether you paid it back with interest. The composer’s obligation is not to pretend to be untainted, but to metabolize what’s heard - to make influence audible as invention.
It’s also a quiet swipe at ownership culture: the impulse to reduce creativity to property disputes. Foss asks us to listen less like auditors and more like readers of intent, craft, and consequence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|
More Quotes by Lukas
Add to List
