To me, that doesn't seem so much in support for DRM, so much as support for something like the negation of "death of the author".

I think there is room to say both "this was the authorial/creatorial intent behind Mario's sprite, which should be acknowledged as being distinguished by being the intent" and to say "I aesthetically appreciate this deviation from the creator's intent, more so than the original intent."

The deviation in interpretation from the original intent is, I think, a new (derivative) creation, in a sense. (Though it may be an accident, and might not have an intent to create behind it.)

I think there's plenty of modern pixel/block art that's awesome, http://www.nuklearpower.com/2001/03/05/episode-002-why-is-he... as an early example.

But we should appreciate modern pixel artwork as a cool retro-themed anachronism, not an actual representation of what displays rendered in the past. The idea that a pixel is only a 2D square gets in the way of that -- ideally, people could understand that it refers to both a point sample as well as a box-filtered rendering of that sample, and those two senses imply different ways to view a set of pixels.