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Art

Just Kids

Patti Smith · 2010 · 9 ideas · 9 min

Argues that becoming an artist requires total, almost reckless devotion to one's creative identity, and that the deepest creative partnerships can sustain and transform two people even after romantic love changes shape.

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Why this book

Patti Smith's memoir of her early years in New York with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe makes an argument less through explicit statement than through lived example: that serious artistic development demands a willingness to live in poverty, uncertainty, and social marginality for the sake of work that has no guaranteed audience or payoff. Smith and Mapplethorpe arrived in the city as unknowns, sustained each other through hunger, odd jobs, and constant rejection, and slowly built the confidence and craft that would eventually make them, respectively, a major rock poet and one of photography's most significant and controversial artists.

The book matters because it offers a rare, unsentimental account of what artistic ambition actually costs day to day, alongside an unusually candid portrait of a bond that began as romance, evolved as Mapplethorpe's sexuality became clearer to him, and settled into a lifelong creative partnership that neither person ever treated as diminished by that change. Smith wrote it partly as a promise fulfilled to Mapplethorpe before his death, and the book functions as both cultural history of a specific downtown New York scene and a tribute to a particular, irreplaceable friendship.

Who should read it

Aspiring artists and writers curious about the practical realities of creative apprenticeship, and readers interested in the late-1960s and 1970s New York art and music scene, will find this rewarding. It also appeals to anyone interested in nontraditional love stories that outlast conventional romantic categories.

About the author

Patti Smith is an American singer-songwriter, poet, and visual artist widely credited as a pioneering figure of punk rock, best known for her 1975 album Horses.

The ideas

01Poverty was treated as a tolerable cost of artistic apprenticeship, not a crisis to escape immediately02A relationship can outlast its original romantic form and remain the most important bond of a lifetime03Mutual belief between two unknown artists can substitute for external validation neither yet has04Immersion in a specific creative community accelerated both artists' development05Discipline and ritual, not just raw talent, structured their creative lives06Gender and sexual identity in the arts of that era were far more fluid than mainstream culture acknowledged07Mapplethorpe's photography emerged from a deliberate, controversial embrace of provocative subject matter08Financial precarity forced both artists into resourceful, improvisational creative methods09Writing the memoir itself fulfilled a promise made in the face of impending loss
artistic-lifenew-yorkcreative-partnership1970spunkmemoir
About this summary. Wisdomly re-expresses a book's ideas, arguments, and structure in our own words — nothing here is the author's text. Summaries are a map, not the territory: if the ideas land, the full book is worth your money and your evenings.