Really interesting topic, Taylor. And lots of great resources from people here.
If you're still looking for someone to interview, I'd be up for it.
Before starting to learn programming in my mid-20s, I studied art and art history and played music. Nowadays I do "interactive" or digital art and design.
I think one of the chief difficulties in this conversation is that we use the word "art" simultaneously to mean two different things. On the one hand, it means: "something done excellently". You might say, "she artfully diffused that conflict" or "he's an expert at the art of negotiation".
On the other hand there's the societal function we call "Art". Today, that means painting, sculpture, film, photography, and other things brought together in museums, galleries, international biennials, and other such venues. These objects are part of the "Art World", a network of people engaged in intellectual, physical, social, and economic exchange with each other.
Art in this second sense (as distinct from the first sense) has existed for all of human history. Of course, there hasn't always been an Art Market. Instead there have been different mechanisms for cultures to support groups of people making representations: from tribal paintings as far back as the Lascaux caves and the Venus of Willendorf to church-supported sculptures and frescoes to kings commissioning portraits and history paintings, each historical era has found a different mechanism for supporting Art and in the process given Art a completely different meaning and social context.
Now there's two places where things get really complicated. First, there are historical periods (like the present) where we're kind of halfway between different modes of supporting (and deciding what is) Art. The art market, which started in about 1850 and is still chugging along, has weakened and, in the last 20 years, the international biennial system,and the power of museums have both grown up to become its peers. And, even more recently, digital forms of art distribution and creation have arisen that are even less well-incorporated into the existing systems (despite Cory Arcangel having a show at the Whitney).
When these different models of art distribution (along with their differing definitions of Art and differences in what they value in art) co-exist, everything gets messy and confusing.
And the second thing that makes things confusing is: it's sometimes hard to distinguish between "Art" in this second sense and "art" in the first sense of "excellence". For example, the Art World's opinion of "craft" (another word for "excellence in making") tends to oscillate wildly with fashion. In the 70s, conceptual art raised questions about the economic and material basis of art, often by producing work that flaunted its lack of physical effort, its lack of craft. Other times Art makes extravagant use of craft in order to make a political or institutional point, for example in the use of traditional weaving and fabric crafts in much art taking gender as its topic. Other artists cultivate an idealistic vision of crafts from an earlier era as more pure than the technology of their time and make reference to these in order to appropriate that sense of purity. Still other artists fetishize the craft of contemporary technology in order to engage with what they see as the essence of the present (Italian Futurists).
So, it's obvious that programming can be art in the lowercase, craft/excellence sense of the term. But can programming be Art? Well, there's a rich tradition of using computers in the Art World dating at least back to the 60s. Like Rune said, though, a lot of times that work is less about the code than about the effect produced by the code. These types of digital artists write code and build technology in order to make Art about (and out of) the role that technology plays in our lives. A great recent example of this is Caleb Larsen's A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter:
Basically, it's a box that sells itself on eBay. When you buy it, you agree to connect it to the internet. It then goes on eBay, lists itself, and is sold on to the highest bidder. It's like a tracer bullet for revealing network-aided commercial exchange, the line between the physical and the digital, the idea of ownership, etc.
The art here isn't really the code or hardware that Larsen built, but the object as a whole and how it behaves and how people react to it.
I'm hard pressed to find examples of code itself being treated as Art in the capital-A sense. One place I see that kind of emerging at the moment is in the community around creative coding toolkits like OpenFrameworks.
Some of the work in those communities resembles the "social practice" work emerging in many other parts of the art world: groups of artists working together as a collective in a manner where the individual works are less important than the community itself, imagined as an experiment or alternative society and/or deeply engaged with the wider community around them.
From this point of view, the collective construction of these open source creative coding toolkits, in addition to being products that increase the efficiency of common commercial work, is the actual Art product itself of these collectives.
It's not impossible to imagine someplace like Eyebeam exhibiting pieces of the OpenFrameworks source code along with artifacts produced from it (the long catalog of examples) and documentation of the collective events in which these were produced.
To be clear: I don't think anything like that has actually happened yet, but it feels like we're on the verge of it. And between that possibility for code to enter existing Art venues and the likelihood of new, unimagined venues, for code-as-art emerging online it seems like we're just on the verge of source code as source code really becoming Art.
Coda:
People often find statements like the one in that last paragraph really frustrating. Why should some institution get to decide whether or not something I care about is art?!? I think that frustration comes from the confusion about "Art" (as institution) vs "art" (as positive descriptor of quality). By saying that something isn't "Art" I'm not saying that it is not excellent or important or meaningful or valuable. And one of the best parts of Art as a collective institution at the current moment is that it's open to change and transformation. A lot of the most prominent Art careers in the last 100 years have been created by forcing some new medium or format into the Art World, from collage to photography to installation, performance, conceptual art, and now social practice and relational aesthetics.
I feel strongly about this distinction because I believe that the long traditions of capital-A Art include a lot of valuable knowledge for understanding and interpreting the world. Want to know about how we see and what that means for gender, economic relations, how we imagine the natural world and built environment? Want to know about power relations between the people who make things and the people who pay for those things? Want to know about the effect of technology as a mediator for how people understand the world and communicate? Artists have been thinking about these topics (and doing so through making and social action) for literally hundreds and thousands of years. Their existing answers won't necessarily apply perfectly for us, but we could learn a lot by studying how they've approached these questions and what tools they have created for operating on them.
In an era when Kickstarter is bigger than the NEA, I worry about a tendency I frequently see in technology-centered people to want to collapse these two definitions of art: to substitute the artfully made for Art. It makes me worry that all of the knowledge about those questions (and many more) contained in the history of Art will be lost, or even intentionally expunged, to be replaced with artfully made, beautiful, and whimsical things which don't ask these kinds of questions.
-- Greg