Is this quilt art?

So I made some more progress on my art quilt.  First, I decided rather than "This quilt is art" I'm going with "is this quilt art".  I took the diane-shiko block and cut out the word "IS", satin stitched around it, covered it with water soluble stabilizer and quilted using three different colors of thread.  So that leaves this block:

I liked it so much, I decided rather than mixed technique, I would do all the blocks like this.  However, I think for the words QUILT and ART I am going to try to suspend them inside the cut out space.  We'll see how it goes when I get there.

Today I used a tutorial Diane Gaudynski posted to try a new design called Celtic Bubbles. This was a really fun design to create, although my circles are just not perfect!  I need to work on the spacing between my echoing lines (the one thing I noticed is my stitch length is getting to be very consistent- that's exciting!)  I think the best way to do this is to doodle more, my drawing isn't very good either...

This will be the background for the word "this", which I will hopefully get done this week.

I need to figure out when the guild art quilt challenge is due.

I'm thinking maybe I should do some hand embroidery with yarn on it, just to give it more color (or at very least satin stitch around the letters in darker thread to hide the quilting that had to come up to the fabric to attach the floating threads), and possibly dye the quilt.  I don't know yet

Mario quilt still just needs binding, but I have to take out my embroidery machine to get a label on it, so I'm not very motivated to finish.