Picasso DID cheat - he stole all his best ideas from better but lesser known artists. He was even quoted as saying "good artists create - great artists steal".
Man, open book!
I'm going to guess he had a sense of humour and had his tongue planted firmly in his cheek and a glass of vino in his hand when he said it.
Picasso hardly meant that great artists steal popular designs whose original source is known to everyone. What Picasso did mean was that great artists rummage through the great junk heap of lost, bypassed, and forgotten ideas to find the rare jewels, and then incorporate such languishing gems into their own personal artistic legacy.
It could also be said that Picasso may have taken that comment from another master of his own time;
T. S. Eliott
One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
The key to the legitimate reuse of creative works is not in what you take or how much, but in the end result. The end justifies the means, in this case. The law calls this end result a ‘transformative work.
Context my good man context.
It very much along the same line of thought that in comedy/humour there are only three unique punch lines/themes. All others are just variations of the theme.
