They say, before making comments about what they think is art :-)

> There's no artistic impetus, no political/social/cultural message.

There is, as you state in your next couple of sentences:

> … monopolistic megacorp funded to show off … typical "look at how much money we spent" exercise to showcase

You can, probably rightly, call it a crappy impetus. But that was impetus for the exercise and could be called the artistic impetus. Even if you disagree strongly on that particular point, it is definitely a message.

To be slightly more fair, that wallpaper is a major part of the initial impression people have of the OS version, much like XP's Telly Tubby Hill did. The XP image was trying to convey “friendly, welcoming”, the Win10 one tries to convey something more like “dynamic, technically competent, flashy”. While it may not be an expression of someone's inner feelings or a societal property or anything like that, some art is more about directing your impression of something than it is about expressing someone else's and that is what this image was for and what it does.

99.9999% of all art is not commissioned by a rich patron to put up on exhibition for MoMa. It's just something that artists do.

IT geeks are all for imposing their own creative restrictions on their work -- using Haskell when the competition is using PHP, developing their own distributed network persistence layer on top of SQLite when there are products out there that already exist but they just don't like for pseudospiritual reasons.

But artists who just make pictures are expected to be cost-effective and not to put any value on their artisanship?

> It's a computer wallpaper that monopolistic megacorp funded to show off how wealthy it is.

Groan. It's not possible to have a serious discussions with someone starting from such a cynical position. After all, what is even the point of creating anything? We're all going to turn to dust and be forgotten forevermore.