demoscene reason d'etre is antithetical to museums. But i think this is very fitting for a time when, as you say, "we are losing more and more control over the hardware and software that we buy"

This may be a huge ego trip or pure gatekeeping, but I never wrote anything that I expected people to run, look at the pretty pixels, and be done.

You cannot be truly impressed if you don't know the effort to put that art into a tiny file or abuse the hardware in ways never seen before. If you never fired a debugger or other development/reverse engineering tool, then you missed most it had to offer. And IMHO you never connected to the artist in any way.