Plato's conception of art needs some investigation. I want to explore specifically the aspect concerning the 'double removal' from truth, or being. We start with the concept of something (e.g., "couch", to use Plato's example), and this concept is said to range over all particular couches. So couch A and couch B may be materially constituted in completely different ways (A is made of straw and wool whereas B is made of metal and cloth), but insofar as they both instantiate the function that "couch" calls for (presumabely, being a legged, long piece of furniture for resting), both couches may be fairly designated by that concept. Plato's claim is that an art object participates in an analogous relation as "particular" and "concept", except in its case it is between itself and a particular, respectively. This is where the notion of double removal comes from. Particulars are (singly) 'removed' from their concept just as an art object is removed from its particular, thus in a transitive way the art object is doubly removed from the original concept.
A language which admits of degrees of being and degrees of truth is useful for comprehension. I often personally get frustrated with the idea that something can be more true than another or that something can simply be more than another. My usual notion of being is a function of whether there is a thing in the world which instantiates its concept. The notion of truth too is merely a function of a proposition's correspondence with an objective state of affairs. These notions don't exactly admit of degrees -- something either is or is not, or a statement is either true or false (Just how many details are wrong in the statement doesn't affect how false the statement as a whole is -- it takes only one). But I have to admit that I'm being a little hasty in dismissing the idea that we can speak meaningfully about 'more' truth and 'more' being, and I think a proper modification of the concepts can help us make sense of Plato's taxonomy.
Plato speaks of the forms as having the most truth and the most being. I will be fair to Plato and not take him as meaning to posit some ethereal realm of forms that exists outside space and time; that would be unfairly attributing weighty metaphysical claims to Plato that he may not necessarily have intended. For us, a form will function as a concept without any metaphysical significance. Strictly speaking, a form is itself NOT spatiotemporal, though it may designate things which are. I believe that the most important distinguishing property about all forms is their timeless and eternal character, and I will take this property as equivalent to highest being and highest truth. For example, in our universe's existence, dogs have only inhabited it for a finite, quantifiable length of time. However, in an important sense, "dog" (as form) has always existed because in principle this form is always 'there' for designating (whether or not there are any objects in the world that can satisfy its conditions as a referent) and its existence as form is not conditioned by time or whether or not it has occupied a person's mental content in the guise of a concept. Similarly, eternal truths would be such that they range over all possible worlds. This is the sense of "eternal" Plato invokes in his description of all forms.
Now let's take all dogs that have ever existed as our object. These dogs do not have the eternal character of "dog" that we described above; the existence of dogs is finite and specific to time. Thus, by our new definition, they have 'lesser' being. It appears then that the degree of being that an object has is directly proportional to its approaching timelessness and eternity.
We can make sense of the double removal from being of art since an artwork stands in direct relation not to a form, but to a particular instantiation of the form (at least according to Plato). We've already seen that all beings conditioned by time and only approximate a form have a lesser degree of being, so if the artwork's existence is contingent upon such a being, then the artwork's being necessarily has a lesser degree than both the form itself and its instantiation.
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