Theres isn't any clear-cut definition for what art is in today's society. It seems to be that anything made with even the slightest trace amounts of creativity are now being called art. Traditional art has always been an example of beauty, nature and ingenuity of the human mind. It used to take real significant effort to make a true work of art.
These days, anyone can call themselves an artist. A person can glue a tin can to a toilet seat and then provide a detailed explanation of how metaphoric it is and how it expresses some aspect of something he came up with off the top of his head, and call it art. Half the time, such explanations aren't even there; these creations of effortlessness still stand proudly in museums among works that took years of time and thought into making.
Almost a century ago, a collection of thinkers started a vicious attack on any traditional form of art as a lash-out against the violence of World War I. Many of these people had been in the war and had seen first hand the new forms of destruction, and lived to tell about it. These people began some works of art that looked outrightly hideous, but nonetheless took time and effort to create in the first place. These hideous works were to show society what these artists thought of that day's culture.
Art has deteriorated ever since. The dada and minimalist movements came, and more and more art has become something that takes place more in the mind of the creator than the actual product. There's a good chance that if they could, some people would submit an empty display case to a museum and give some chalked up reason for doing so.
The point of all this is that today's culture has almost totally lost sight of what art really is. Traditional, "pretty" art is all but gone from modern culture, and anyone who does compose a new piece of classical music or paint an elegant painting, or carve a fine sculpture out of marble, is almost entirely ignored, if not looked down upon. Art and creativity is for the most part a dead word, used only to identify a thing that a person makes, with or without implied meaning. Perhaps the concept of art and meaning in art is simply all in ouir heads.
I understand the impulse to question "is it art?" in terms of definitions. You have to take into account the history of modern civilization (broadly, modernism) as well as cultural developments such as media, popular culture, technology etc. But that is a relatively tall order. Ultimately it can come down to a question of taste i.e. it's not about "is it art?" but "is it good art, or bad art?" Or is it beautiful art or ugly art. Ugly art seems to challenge the notion of beauty as you suggest. But is there good ugly art? Is there bad beautiful art? Art that tries to break definitions or get under people skin is also often called activist art, which dovetails with politics. Take a look at the work of MacArthur Genius award winner Camille Utterback.
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