That's a pretty poor example. Not all tools are equal, and one of the important ways to describe a tool is by what degrees of freedom it affords the user, and w

That's a pretty poor example. Not all tools are equal, and one of the important ways to describe a tool is by what degrees of freedom it affords the user, and what aesthetic decisions are baked into it. A paintbrush has a lot of degrees of freedom and makes few assumptions. Even for tools that do a lot for you, finding unexpected/unintended degrees of freedom or subverting those aesthetic decisions is one way that artists innovate. From the article it seems that most of the aesthetic decisions in the resulting work were baked into the tool, not made by the artist. That said, a huge part of an artist's work is contextualizing their work and building a story around it, so in some ways if these guys were able to successfully convince people that it was worth $435k then good on them. I just don't expect that to last. When video equipment was inaccessible to most, simple video art was innovative and new. Now that the tools are easy to get and use the work needs to be more sophisticated.