A Dog at Play: an exploration of artistic agency and autonomy

This is, by in large, just a repost of a comment on another post that it seems bears reposting as its own OP:

Let's take a work of art titled "a dog in play". This text is in fact that piece of art, as it is a piece of pure conceptual art about another series of pieces of art, some of which are real and others of which are hypothetical! How fun is that? Anyway, on to the meat and potatoes:

Let's say I write on a piece of paper "slather this dog up in nontoxic edible paint and tie this laser pointer on a strong to swing around the room with the dog chasing it; pull yourself to the ceiling with a harness and rope, and then take a picture of the floor. Do this three times across three days and send me the pictures."

I then select the best of these three and post it in a gallery titled "A Dog at Play; day three".

Arguably, I am the artist of that piece, when all I did is write on a piece of paper and pick one of the outputs. All sorts of agency and autonomy existed between me and the output, but I'm still the artist just as much as Warhol.

Lets say later, a dog watches me painting a flower and takes interest, and so I show them carefully how to hold a brush and pick up paint with it and smear it on a canvas, much like I taught my cat to open doors. I then leave the dog in a place with empty canvases, paints, and brushes, and a video recorder in the corner. Eventually, the dog sees this and picks up the brush, places a canvas, and actually starts painting a flower. Not a human mind you, but a dog. When they are done they pick it up in their slobbery mouth and drop it at my feet like "look at what I did". Let's call this piece of art "A Yellow Flower" in liew of the dog's inability to title the piece. Or perhaps "bark! Bark bark!".

Now, the painting's artist is NOT me. The painting's artist is, actually, the dog there. But, "a dog at play" here is not actually the dog's painting. MY art is the video of the dog, cleverly captured. I am still the artist, not of the painting, but of the video.

In fact, this description of a video is actually of a real.poece of art that I did not create and am not the original artist of, for all this text about that video IS an original piece of art in its own right.

You see, the thing about what makes the artist the artist of a piece is the creative agency over the result, the power to say "I am done" Or "this is NOT done".

The only thing I can think that might lead folks to not understand this is purely inexperience and youth.