[have_faith]

Internet art will always be ephemeral. Protocols will eventually change, technologies evolve. You can't put your piece of internet art in your archives and wait for the value to go up. There's also just the barrier to entry on how you explain ownership of a piece of art that can be copy and pasted.

I definitely sit more on the cynical side, but only because I think the art world is mostly as you say, a complex money transfer amongst those in the know. Kind of a high brow pyramid scheme.

[Zofren]

I disagree with the implied notion here that Internet art is any more ephemeral than physical art. Physical art, whether it be a statue or a painting, will eventually need to be preserved and maintained to ensure it is available for future generations. Transferring a digital art file to a different media or changing the storage protocol or making backups in case of data loss is just another form of art preservation.

[have_faith]

The key difference being I guess that preserving digital art usually involves making copies and backups as opposed to there being a single-source-of-truth so to speak like the physical world. I think this is the major factor contributing to a lack of digital art in modern collections, it's just too easy to copy.