Art Creating Art Creating Art

It's an interesting question: does a piece of art (music, book, play, painting, sculpture, etc) lose it's intrinsic artistic value/meaning the more popular it becomes and the more frequently it is reproduced?  My initial reaction is...no. Because art should be fluid, existing and changeable in the popular culture. I write a song which in turn becomes so popular that other artists want to sing that song. In so doing they make it their own, creating another piece of art that is both an interpretation of mine but also specific to them. And so it goes.
For example, much of musical theatre is comprised of musical interpretations of literary novels. There are hundreds of musicals that use books as their source material. A personal favorite of mine is Spring Awakening. Based on a German play written in 1891 by Frank Wedekind, it was turned into a musical in 2006 by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. The original play was subtitled, A Children's Tragedy, and dealt with sexually oppressive German culture in the nineteenth century. The musical version takes that idea of children on the brink of sexual awakening and sets period-esque book scenes against contemporary rock music. The concept is that the musical numbers are the inner expression of the angst and frustration that children feel while growing up. The writers make the point that when left alone, kids just want to rock out, and so when the musical numbers take place the children use hand-mics, literally becoming rock stars until the music stops.

At which point they go back into scenes that are written in the period of the late 1800s. If Wedekind hadn't written the original German play we wouldn't have the contemporary musical (which as very popular, winning multiple Tony Awards and running for over 2 years). You can't have one without the other. Does the popularity and success of the musical overshadow the initial artistic impetus of the original play? Or does that very success owe itself entirely to the play?

I think the purpose of art is to inspire. If that inspiration takes the form of simulation, than that simulation can stand as both a copy of the original and a new original in it's own right. Why can't both pieces of art be "legitimate, good, beautiful"? There are probably some purists who value the original play of Spring Awakening  better than the musical, and that's fine. The subjective nature of art ensures that you will never please all the people all the time, and vice versa. But that is not what the artist need concern themselves with. Rather, their job is to create, and let those creations inspire other creations, on and on for as long as there are artists. Now watch more of the musical...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsR3te9wJKE