Levels of Art Inspiration

an attempt to rank some "levels":
*Drawing a portrait of the artist who made the art you like
*references
*Re-tellings, remakes
*Same characters and world, new stories [fanfiction]
*New characters and world, same story [or scene, etc] [= “trope” or plagiarism][or “reference”, especially if it’s small]
**New characters...but really they are copied characters
**Copied elements
*genre?
*Thematic level copying = “spiritual successor”
*having multiple influences, including non-art influences
so what am i trying to measure in this ranking? probably several different things, maybe stuff like:
* degree of influence
* degree of creativity/originality
what would a spectrum of "showing" VS "telling" look like? and beyond showing, i think, to "exemplifying"
== Invention and Discovery ==
[the false dichotomy of] invention and discovery very much applies to art, of course
[following issue mostly about inventing "Styles"? and "genres"] how do you invent a new one of these:
* “Doo-wop OR techno….OR new style X?” [wikipedia page on music genres, and a huge list of music genres]
* architecture styles
* painting styles or movements
* movie genre/subgenre
*List of Aesthetics on the aesthetics wiki, and another list on CARI institute
different styles of art in different mediums all have their own histories, would be helpful to research these
=== Speciation ===
A lot of this is a bit like speciation/tree of life.  This invention problem is one i worked a lot when i was a kid drawing new alien species. Never uploaded my childhood drawings on deviantart or flickr or wherever, but back then i was churning them out faster than an animorphs book. Closest thing is maybe my “undersea journey” picture. Here’s a thread where i posted some of the unfamiliar animal pictures i collected
in this blog post, biologist PZ Myers is trying to make a "levels of art originality" type thing, for species of fictional aliens [i made some related comments on a later blog post]. I'm not sure he applies the criteria very consistently, or you could say that earth life already has explored so many shapes, that it's easy to claim an alien is "not very original" if it vaguely shares ANY characteristic with an earth life form. For example he claims "The heptapod aliens in Arrival are space-faring octopuses, putting them squarely in the Type IVa category". The clue in the name "heptapod" already disproves this, and (if i recall) so does the rest of the alien's biology...well, except for the awkward fact that they squirt ink...and perhaps you could accuse the body of resembling a human, but then that would be classified as "IVb", not "IVa".
So, species:
* First, in broad strokes, we ALREADY have every shape of life form!  Shapeless blobs, geometric shapes, and various body plans, limb layouts, etc.. Alien worlds could similarly evolve every type of body
* convergent evolution: raptorial arms of the mantis, the mantis shrimp, the mantis fly
* 2nd, some of it is pretty predictable. or sensible (that's part of natural selection, after all)
** Could probably easily find correlations between speed, weight, and amount of symmetry axes
*** heavier species need to content with gravity, so this is one axis that symmetry might form around. [pure example trees]
*** some species have a direction of motion, thus an explanation for a froward and backward axis of symmetry [pure example: worms]
**** no direction of motion is fine for sea stars, which are slow. arguably this becomes less practical as speed increases
*** combining these we get bilateral symmetry, plane symmetry constructed of these two axes, it seems
*** i could imagine measurable numbers like specific gravity (relative to fluid medium) and reynolds number adding to some of these predictions
** [of course, sometimes other reasons for directionality:  some plants face a direction:  the direction of sunlight]
== See also: ==
* also the "learn by copying someone else's style" VS trying to be "completely original". like traditionalism VS innovation
* and that supposed 3 components to creativity: copying, modification, and combination
*nice put-togethers
* consumer production
* ryan gosling papyrus skit