There's often an implied point in the "but you didn't", which is that it might be harder than you think.

I knew someone who was a big fan of Jackson Pollock. He's famous, and he's also a useful punching bag because his paint splatters just look random. It wasn't until I tried it myself that I realized that splattering paint in a way that looked to me like a Jackson Pollock painting was... not something I could easily do.

I still don't particularly care for Jackson Pollock's paintings, but that moment was a useful reminder to me that even for things like programming, we have a tendency to underestimate the subtlety required to produce "good enough" work product.

When I make a snarky comment about that sort of concept art, and somebody gives me the "but you didn't" response, I usually double down out of spite. When the only thing anybody can say about some art that it's "interesting" or "cool", it generally means it's pretty awful.

Art is about how we convey emotional information -- the "But you didn't" part of modern art is a reference to the hard part of creating art being the conception, not the implementation.

In other words, making is art is hard NOT because of the physical act BUT because of the intellectual labor of distilling or serializing emotions into something that can be made is hard.

It's kind of a two-for-one in this way since you can delight people with the novel use of technology -- something they have the same access to as the artist and genuinely could have physically done as well as convey the actual message of the art.

Writing software is generally pretty similar, the hard part isn't mashing the keys in the right order -- almost anyone can do that, literally. It's asserting a what will be out of the infinite possibilities of what could be.

I think 'truely interesting' is one of the highest compliments you can give to art.

Exactly! It's awful art and you probably shouldn't go to the exhibit and waste your time but more importantly it's still art.