I would not say that the value of art is strictly equivalent to technical difficulty. But I would say that there is a level of technical competence required for art to be good. Something that takes no skill to create (e.g. that absurd banana duct taped to a wall "piece") is not good art, if indeed it can be called art at all.
I would argue art is not about how "good" it is, but rather how it makes you feel. And the duct tape banana, just by referencing it, is successful in making you feel something.
The fact that people still talk about it and ridicule it 6 years after it was created, and it lives on in the cultural zeitgeist as that, makes it good art. It's literally called Comedian.
It had to be removed from the fair early because it was drawing dangerously large crowds. [1] If art moves people, Comedian was an undeniably literal success.
Congratulations, you're the type of person Marcel Duchamp was making fun of in 1917. 108 years later, the stance you're defending has been so comprehensively trashed by the art community that anything I could say about it has been said a thousand times already.
If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that, the only thing they have succeeded in is convincing most of the rest of us that their opinion on what is and isn't art is irrelevant.
Which is to say, it's not that I don't think it's art. It's that most people would agree with me that it isn't art, and what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus, not by what a bunch of snobs decide it means.
> If by "art community" you mean people who make "art" like that
I didn't.
> what the word means in colloquial speech is defined by popular consensus
If I asked for the popular consensus on the definition of, say, "insouciant," and the majority of people answered, "I don't know," does that mean the word has no meaning?
Which is to say, no, meaning is not a democracy. It's contextual, and I don't care what art means in a context exclusive to people who don't really give a shit about art (which is the context you're appealing to when you say, "most people would agree with me that it isn't art").
