What is ASCII Art?
Some define it solely as the conversion of a picture to an ASCII file. However, this conversion can be done by a program. And there is not much creativity in starting a program which does "all the work". There is, of course, creativity in programming, but not much art is starting a program. Therefore I do not consider an ASCII picture which was generated by a program as "art". Sorry.
The result of a conversion can be improved by using a better resolution of the picture - but this leads to an enormous amount of data. But if I wanted a good picture with no restriction to its size then I'd prefer seeing pictures with color.
What amazes me most, however, are small ASCII pictures of objects. So for me the art consists in using a minimal amount of data for such a representation of an object.
Disagree all you want. ;-)
And that's why the pictures you will find here mostly are little ones. They usually are only up to four lines long so as to fit into signatures.
However, there are also some bigger ones. Those have been selected because they are exceptional in one way or the other.
NOTE: *No* ANSI stuff here. And no converted pictures from other formats (such as GIF), either. These tend to be big and are much better viewed in real life. And I rather let other people spend their quota on this. ;-)