Gerard,
I guess my thoughts really come down to the fact that technical fireworks aren't necessary for there to be an art, but the person doing the art should be capable of technical fireworks or some sort of prodigious talent. Otherwise how do we separate the amateurs from the pros?
Thats why when someone like Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein plays the Moonlight Sonata 1st movement it is a masterwork and when a 11 year old plays it at their yearly recital it's cute.
In the painting hemisphere you can take someone like Picasso--who was completely capable of painting incredibly intricate "classical style" artworks but really made his fame on trying something "different". This is vs someone like Jackson Pollack who as far as I'm concerned pulled the wool over a great many eyes.
Okay it's obviously pointless to keep responding to you, but...
I don't like the famous pianist analogy- it would work better to compare composers (not that there isn't artistry to performing great piano works, I play piano myself and interpreting music is it's own art, but I digress...). What you're saying about art is more akin to saying that because the Moonlight Sonata is a great piece of music, John Cage's 4'33" could never be a valid or important work. Or because Crime and Punishment is a great novel, an e e cummings poem can't possibly also be a valid piece of writing.
We live in a different world than Rembrandt, Monet, da Vinci, or Picasso. Why should all artists, or composers, or writers have to create works that are mere hollow pastiche of past works just to prove they can? It's okay for scientists to build on the work of the past without independently repeating every single important experiment ever performed, so why can't artists build upon past work and create art using the materials, techniques, and thematic content of today? Why should artists have to pass some crazy sort of test to validate their work by proving first they have, say, the technical skill to do a Renaissance-style oil painting? Picasso's work post-1900 isn't considered brilliant
even though it's not as technically complex as a renaissance painting (that's a debatable point anyways), it's brilliant
because he combined contemporary and historical influences with contemporary themes to create a new style of art that expanded the possibility of what art could look like and express.
And all of this isn't to necessarily say that I think the $4.3 mil bed is like the worlds most super amazing and influential piece of art ever, but it just seems so willfully ignorant when people say "oh I just don't get modern art, my 5 year old could it" that I can't help myself- I just have to say something. :P