It's a bit like coding, where simple and elegant solutions only come to you after you reach a certain level. People looking into your work might think that the solution is simple enough that even a junior could do it, but it's not the case. It takes another good engineer to spot one. :)
This is incorrect (although I don't know anything about the artist in question). Contemporary art degrees are heavily moving away from teaching craft or even consider it a valid aesthetic or criterion for judgement (along the lines of rejecting the notion of good/bad/better/worse). Was there any identifiable craft involved in this piece? Did the artists remove from circulation the boxes that weren't broken in just the right way? Is the art more interesting to look about than to talk about? Marginally... I find the pile of boxes sorta aesthetically pleasing, but its not clear to me that was even done by the artist (and not the gallery).
What part of this piece are you proposing that a total outsider/complete amateur couldn't create on a first pass? The form of the glass looks to be haphazard, (ie, unimportant the artist). The boxes are off the shelf. What else is left?
That is an interesting perspective. I have always judged art by its aesthetics and its ability to elicit thought / conversation equally.
In my view art becomes shallow when it is purely visually appealing with no conceptual backing or purely conceptual with uninteresting visual components.