That question is part of the interesting discussion. If you scan a statue and then print that scan, you've clearly made a copy of something. So the scan is, by some definitions, also "the thing". But you created the scan and had to clean it up and fix weird bugs where a pixel was out of place etc, so the scan is also its own thing.
So one argument goes that making the scan is a creative process and it gets its own copyright, and using that scan to produce a copy of a piece of art goes to a different copyright. But is that printed copy a derivative work? or a copy? Was the scan "new art"? or was it "technical recreation?"
There are a lot of interesting angles. I heard a discussion on NPR about paintings that had been severely damaged due to natural disasters and museums hired artists who were familiar with the style, and with materials similar to the original artists, work to restore the painting from pictures of its previous state. Of course the restoration artists can't exactly reproduce the painting and they bring their own talent and creativity to the process. So are they now part owner of the copyright? Is it a partnership work? One artist dead, the other alive? Clearly if it was a work for hire with copyright assignment that is moot for the artist but does the museum now have some claim of copyright?
Some of the more interesting rabbit holes you can get lost in when you take a very technical approach to copyright.
Suppose you scanned the Ship of Thesus at the port where it docked, and then printed each board out. Would the recombination of the boards make the Ship again, or wouldn't it?
I always find it fascinating amazing what 2000-year old questions still have bearing on technology recently created.
It's clearly a derivative work. If printing a copy is transformative (and my opinion is no, it's not), then it is also gets its own copyright. So the owner of the original work doesn't get the copyright of the new work, but can still sue for infringement.
It's not a derivative work unless additional creative effort is added. Altering the scan to increase the faithfulness of the reproduction is not creative effort--no more than if you edited an OCR scan of a printed work to correct the typos. Nor are mistakes in the reproduction introduced by an automated process creative efforts.
If you intentionally altered the bust to convert the crown into a bundle of hot dogs, that would be a derivative work. No one would care much about it, though, as the original is what's famous, and they would prefer a faithful reproduction of that to anything you might do to your copy to make it uniquely yours.
Similarly, a photograph of a painting that has been digitally retouched to fix the colors is not a derivative work.
You have to intentionally do something to make your copy uniquely distinguishable from the original. It can be anything. Put a hairy mole on David's buttock. Change the Creation of Adam such that the creator is the FSM. Sneak the TARDIS into Starry Night. Replace all the human heads with Kooikerhondje heads in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp.
The Utah Teapot digital model is a derivative work of the original physical teapot, because it was scaled vertically by 3/4. That's enough. Were it not for that one difference, you wouldn't be able to tell whether someone copied the digital model directly, or remeasured the parameters of the physical model.
(Note that my opinions on this matter are not necessarily going to match those of judges actually able to decide intellectual property disputes.)
Several courts have already ruled that "slavish copies" are not transformative, and not subject to copyright protection. So your opinion on the prints is probably correct.
So one argument goes that making the scan is a creative process and it gets its own copyright, and using that scan to produce a copy of a piece of art goes to a different copyright. But is that printed copy a derivative work? or a copy? Was the scan "new art"? or was it "technical recreation?"
There are a lot of interesting angles. I heard a discussion on NPR about paintings that had been severely damaged due to natural disasters and museums hired artists who were familiar with the style, and with materials similar to the original artists, work to restore the painting from pictures of its previous state. Of course the restoration artists can't exactly reproduce the painting and they bring their own talent and creativity to the process. So are they now part owner of the copyright? Is it a partnership work? One artist dead, the other alive? Clearly if it was a work for hire with copyright assignment that is moot for the artist but does the museum now have some claim of copyright?
Some of the more interesting rabbit holes you can get lost in when you take a very technical approach to copyright.