I do believe it was - and it also betrays the critique: there is a wealth of discourse on what "real" art is - and that discourse has largely moved beyond "art as representative of real world phenomena". That attitude is a component of a larger set of reactionary positions which try to reject modern and post-modern developments in the artistic world as misguided - an orientation which often tries to justify itself through an appeal to the "old masters" and a failure of some modern caste of charlatan art-theorists who've usurped the true intelligentsia.

NFT art is art - probably more-so on an accidental level than by any intention of the original creator. There is a perversity to the context in which it is created, and that contributes to its artistic footprint orthogonal to its actual aesthetic value.

The same is true of this AI generated art. It's a different artistic fingerprint than - say - Dali, but that doesn't mark it as "bad". If anything, the fact that it's created by a machine puts it in a league entirely of its own. There's a great opportunity here for interrogation of art in a machine created context, and I'm excited to see how the dialog around it evolves.

I read it as unsarcastic but self-aware. "I am unashamedly an intellectual and unashamedly consider that X is better than Y and yes, I know that some people regard that sort of thinking as necessarily pretentious and stupid, and I want to indicate that I'm aware of that kind of critique without actually taking up space in what I'm writing to address it."

No, it was a joke.