I would say neither. It's a game. A very fun game.

Art is irreducible.
If something is bigger than the sum of its parts, its art.

If Gameplay + Story + Presentation = Game then its not art.
If Gameplay + Story + Presentation < Game then its art.

I could tell people about the gameplay.
I could tell people about the story.
I could tell people about the cool stuff like the downfall of BoB.

But in the end, the only true way to experience EVE is by playing it, because trying to summarize its parts doesn't give it much credit.

Because your brain automatically breaks it down into parts and sees how broken some of it is.
However, I trained my brain to not do that instantly, and just let the game do its thing.
That way, I can tell if the whole experience is good before I start judging mechanics which might cloud my judgement.

EVE was an awesome experience for me before I broke it down into parts.
Just those first few steps in your CQ, getting your first ship, working up my skills, doing my first market manipulation, it was a great feeling, and it all felt tied together.

This, in my opinion, is art.

It is unclear that this is the primary thing that the 'brain' does. You are describing analysis. We also synthesize. We sometimes do both. Additionally we experience what is currently being called 'insight' by neurologists ("Watchman's Rattle") which has more to do with the more or less immediate acquisition of wholes when the complexity of the phenomena exceeds the cognitive threshold of analytic or synthetic thinking.

What I hear you describing is that the learning curve in EVE tends to exceed cognitive thresholds, in terms of capacity for complexity and such. Responses to this vary. In some cases we try to rabidly apply analytic or synthetic thinking, even though it is in that moment not actually working. Sometimes we sort of tip over into something else as a way of navigating. That can be experienced as a kind of immersion-emergence process, it seems to me. Aspects of it can quite literally be ecstatic.