That said, an appreciation for the arts most certainly affects one's eye for design and taste. It is the difference between a good looking/feeling app and a great one. So much can and should be borrowed from the arts to build products, but perhaps such a loose definition of "artist" is unhelpful.
Obviously, you have never had a masterful sandwich.
I'd say there's two types of software - better experience and novel functionality. You can in be a competitive business and win by offering superior service/design or go into non-competitive markets and offering functionality you can't get anywhere else.
Personally I prefer the noval functionality, being an engineering type, and slide a little on the design, but there's equally as much money in going the artistic route.
There's great technical risk in the functionality route, but there's great market risk in going the artistic route. Steve Blank talks about this in his writings.
The Lean Startup movement is about this market risk. To get a handle on technical risk you'd be better off listening to Elon Musk.
As a software developer, I consider software itself art because I understand the various complexities that arise when creating it, and also how it transforms hardware into something completely different (without software, hardware does nothing.)
Would I compare software to painting, sculpture, or music? Definitely. But that's just me, and before you can convince anyone else otherwise, you first need to convince them to value software as much as you do. The same goes for anything: fashion, cooking, even natural objects and phenomena.
[0]http://www.bucknell.edu/Documents/GriotInstitute/DeanArticle...
Once you have your creation, you just flip a switch and as many editions as anyone would want can be created. This makes the boundary between art and commerce in software almost friction-free, unlike, say, designing a car where a factory costing hundreds of millions of dollars is interposed between design and replication.
There are only a handful of big car producers and they only collectively need something on the order of hundreds to low thousands of trained designers. To these designers, art is part of their education. That's just not going to be the case for software developers.
Great software engineers are (something else).
