Artistic integrity

I had an interesting Facebook conversation last night with author Eric R. Asher about artistic integrity.  It's an intriguing topic, one that has made me run screaming for the metaphorical hills on more than one occasion.

There are times I think "artistic integrity" is over-rated, times that usually occur when someone, for example, decides to single-handedly reinvent every single one of the grammatical and stylistic rules of the English language, then gets perturbed when I suggest that they might want to make their prose (and it's usually prose, rather than poetry) a bit more accessible to their audience.  This usually results in a conversation in which that someone pulls out the "artistic integrity" card and says, "I'm an artist, I can do what I want" (complete with obligatory comma splice).

That being said, I think that "artistic integrity" is important, most of the time.  However, it takes a certain amount of experience and talent to recognize when you're using true artistic integrity, and when you're doing the former.

As Eric said, it's a fine line between the two.  And I agree.  There's certainly something to be said for not following the rules (regardless of your artistic medium), but I think that, in order to do so, you have to be able to prove that you can totally rock the rules first.  And I think that's where the problem lies, when artists decide that they don't need to know the rules at all.

In writing, especially prose, the rules matter a fair bit.  And, I'll agree, rules are made to be broken, but I think that you need to understand the rules and why they're there before you go about breaking them willy-nilly.  If I can't make heads or tails of what someone's written, I'll likely seriously question their use of "artistic integrity."