At what point does the artist stop being the artist if responsibilities for decision-making or fabrication are either shared or delegated entirely? How do we gauge the quality as well as authorship of a work which is created partly or entirely by people other than the artist?

Consider the authorship of motion pictures. Visualize the seemingly endless credits rolling by at the end of countless films. What enormous collaborative efforts those things can be! We experience them less intimately than we do most gallery pieces, nevertheless they are (or can be) works of art. Who's the artist? (If you think only of paintings, sculptures, etc. by individual artists, you get into the mindset that something is art only if it's the product of a lone maker. What lone artist can actually be considered entirely apart from his society (context), however influential or removed it is?) Looking at movie credits, we begin to assign artistic authorship by reading the job titles or descriptions. As in these filmic examples of creative visual art making, there doesn't have to be just one means of assessing credit. But if a gauge must be found, go for one that measures the decision-making: Who made what choices, for what reasons, how well, etc.? While craftsmanship is a highly significant issue, it's not so important who held the tools as who decided what the tools will do . . . what content, what composition with what materials, what shapes, colors, textures, sizes, etc., to what standard of craftsmanship? An artist can be an artist as a writer, as a director, as an actor, as a musician, etc., etc. We enjoy our terms having relatively stable meanings on the one hand, but our awareness of their mutability is among the most delightful aspects of our enjoyment of the arts!