Demos certainly fit most definitions of the hard to define "Art" (with a capital A), but at some level, I think art is anything you put even a little more of yourself into than you need to, and thinking back to some of my conversations with some people in the scene on IRC, you can tell demos more than meet that bar. In a way, demoparties were like a modern take on the French Salon.

Around the same time, I was learning how to play guitar, so I especially got into trackers. Just thinking in a different way about writing and playing music helped. Music is a combo of art and math, and trackers helped me understand this in a different way from my music theory teacher.