I'd argue a good chunk of "Art art" is quite similar: the thing you see is quite unimpressive and really only considered important because of context.

A nice demoscene example is "Piledriver", which contains all of the last 2 decades worth of demoscene tropes, no exceptions. Hexagonal cones, walking robots, purple explosions, drum'n'bass with rap vocals, television walls with earlier scenes, it's all there. And it's extremely well executed, which hides that it's a parody. So I guess it only works as a work of art if you saw the demos it mocks.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=82882

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4zkSd3-6I2A

A lot of art derives value from craft, but when craft is systematized, it becomes product design and targeted towards consumers instead. Demoscene folks have often crossed over to the industrial side of computer graphics and gaming.

A good proportion of the art-as-art world either finds new and original ways to push craft, or focuses on medium facilitating message(which in turn falls neatly into the product-marketing framework).

agreed that it is true for a lot of "high art" too. but much of it can still be appreciated at face value.

I think you could physically implement demos (especially very very small ones) in such a way as to demonstrate just how compact their implementation is. E.g. use ancient computer hardware, load from 5.25" floppy when you press a button to start it, etc.

The best example (counter-example?) of this that I can think of is one of the realtime raytracing demos that came out circa 2000 when it was all the rage. I can't remember the name but basically after doing well in a compo the authors revealed that it was just a rasterizer running at low rez with some hacked reflections, which everyone had believed was super impressive because they thought it was raytracing and the deliberately low resolution made it look the part.

Iirc that was Transgression 2 by MFX: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=672