Digital vs. Classical Art: or rather, Digital vs. Physical Art

What is art?
Does it matter how it's created?
Is a physical medium more "permanent" than the digital medium, and does that make a difference in its meaning?
Is one "harder" to master or more "artistic" than the other?

Consider an oil painting's physical existence - certain, fixed dimensions; the weight of it and the frame selected to accompany it for display. In its own right, it's at the pinnacle of some timeline of technical development. It took countless eons for the concepts of art to develop to the point captured in that painting. Thousands of years of experimentation with pigments and materials to create the paints, brushes & canvas used. A sophisticated evolution of culture and society for humans to develop to the point of having one capable of being an artist of such demonstrated skill. A community where such an individual can showcase their creative expressions, and be encouraged by some to do so.

Now consider a digital work of art. Can be deleted with the press of a button or erased off a disk with a strong magnet. Scalable. Transmittable. Possibly ephemeral. Mutable, mashable, editable, Photoshopable. Just the next step in the evolution of art in the computer era? Maybe. Or something altogether new, masquerading in the guise of something we think we know - realism, astract expression, whathaveyou. "Fine art" broken down into bits, into information, stripped of its physicality.

Are we, as Kurzweil says, entering an Age of Spiritual Machines, in which our physical culture is replaced by a virtual culture - not to mention an overtaking of slow, dimwitted water-filled humans with fast, quantum calculating virtual beings? Even in such a scenario, "art" can still exist. But it's not your grandfather's art, that's for sure.