[foobarbazqux]

Alright, thanks for taking me seriously. I'm feeling a bit touchy today. I think the problem is that I'm using the words artist, job, rules, authority, and creativity in a very liberal way.

I guess my general point is that to be an artist, you have to be creative. To be creative, you have to do something new. To do something new, you have to depart from what exists in some way. Whatever exists can be called authority, tradition, or "the rules". And then something new is a challenge to that authority. If you build a skyscraper in a town with no skyscrapers, you are challenging authority, even if all the other towns have skyscrapers. When parents make a baby, it's a creative act, and the baby ends up challenging the authority of the parents; the baby breaks the existing rules of the family structure. It's the same with the work that an artist does. It doesn't have to be socially rebellious in nature. An expression of beauty that has not been seen before is breaking the rules about the limits of beauty.

Even more generally speaking, when an artist does manage to break the rules, they end up challenging our preconceptions of what can be - these preconceptions are the true "rules" - and it opens us up to a deeper experience of the world. As examples, anything that creates a feeling of awe, anything that touches on sublime beauty, is operating on this level. I think if you look closely, all of the artists you named are working in this way; it's not mere repetition of what came before.