[Nicolai P. Zwar]

Again, I disagree with that.

How dare you!

It’s like the difference between a poor art forger and a great one. Or a poorly planned heist and a perfect one. It’s not normally something we think of as an artform in itself, but I think it is. Even if the ‘originality’ criterion is completely absent. It’s craft masquerading as art.

Well, if you go out of your way to consider everything art that is well done, by all means, sure. But that’s then a lose definition of “art” that just calls “art” something — anything apparently — that is well done. Than neurosurgery can be art, designing Biological weapons for mass destruction can be great art. And sure, you can view anything as art if you wish so, but that is an outlandish and rather meaningless concept when it comes to discussing plagiarism and originality as aesthetic requirements for art, because you can pretty much point to anything and call it “art”.
When used like that, “art” stops meaning creative expression and starts meaning technical proficiency, which is a category error.

A well‑executed forgery or a perfectly planned heist or perfectly designed biological weapons may require skill, intelligence, precision, even creativity, but none of that automatically makes them art. They are examples of craft applied toward a non‑expressive end. The difference is in purpose: it is instrumental, not expressive. It’s purpose is to deceive, steal, evade detection or mass destruction of people. They do not exist to communicate an idea, evoke a feeling, express a concept, or create an aesthetic experience. They exist to accomplish a task. Of course you can view anything like that as art, even a sunset, but as I said, then you’re just opening the definition of so wide it is meaningless to discuss its elements, because it’s just “anything goes”.

But I don’t think “art” per se is defined by how well something is done. Lots of things are done well and are not art. So when discussing art and its aesthetic principles, it’s necessary to have a common ground on which to stand.
So I would say in the context of this discussion, art is the intentional creation and reception of expressive forms, works whose primary purpose is to communicate concepts, ideas, emotions, or experiences through symbolic, aesthetic, or imaginative means. (Feel free to offer an alternative definition, I just looked up and considered some and distilled this one out of various offered ones. But they all more or less defined art like this.)

A forgery, even a brilliant one, is not expressive. There is no doubt a great difference between a great forger and a poor one. It takes enormous skill and technical proficiency to convincingly forge Rembrandt’s “Night Watch”, in fact, it takes such a high degree of technical skill and proficiency that you’d be well equipped to produce “real” art. But a forgery of “Night Watch” is just that, a forgery. Maybe nice to look at, it could still have some value, but it’s not “great art”, it’s mere imitation.

That’s not to say boundaries cannot blur. They obviously can and do (all the time… it’s rare that boundaries are dry cut and clear). A con artist may turn a deception into a performance piece, or a “forger” may create original works in the imitating the style of others to comment on authenticity itself. Such things can of course be “art”, but once again, at that moment they contain something fresh, something “original”. Which I maintain is a pre-requisite for any piece of art to be considered “great”. Or even “good”.

I’ll also add that there are other layers than just originality. Scroll back a few posts, to the one I did on November 1st. Even if a piece of work lacks the ‘genetic’ criterion, it may still offer up values in the others.

Sure, I never claimed otherwise. I never claimed originality is the only layer or all that is required, so yes, no disagreement there. However, I maintain “originality” in some form is a necessary pre-requisite, not a sufficient condition, for anything to be considered “great” or even “good” art.