On the subject of art and programming, I really like how Fred Brooks described it in "The Mythical Man-Month":

The delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of imagination. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself.

I wrote more on this subject in "Why I Love Coding" http://henrikwarne.com/2012/06/02/why-i-love-coding/