I totally agree that programming is an art, but the art lies in the result, not in the "coding style".
Who cares how Michelangelo held his brush or his chisel; what matters is what he made.
Who cares how Michelangelo held his brush or his chisel; what matters is what he made.
Readability and being to able to maintain the code is just as important as the finished product.
Programming isn't just about one-shot projects, it's also about being able to pickup and work with existing source code. Whether it is for someone else or even yourself in the future.
The code you write is an intrinsic part of the result. There goes form and function as one. There can be art in the function as can be art in the ideas embodied in the source code that carries out the function.
I can't swear to chisels but brushwork is extremely important to paintings; you really haven't seen a painting until you've gotten up close and been able to see the texture made by the strokes, and while maybe in theory you can achieve everything with a ham-fisted caveman grip on a brush it seems unlikely.
Which is to say, actually many people care about how artists hold their brushes.
This has been another entry in the billion part series: Why Analogies Are The Weakest Arguments.
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