Can Art Grow Out of Theory?

What makes this question really interesting is the word 'legitimately'. Without it, the answer would be fairly straightforward. Yes, good and important art can and has grown out of a theoretical concept of art's role, its specific limitatons and purposes. The French writer Artaud, for example, thought that theatre should be a 'cruel' experience, and in his plays set about jarring the audience out of a comfortable perspective. In his goal of destroying barries (or at least revealing them) between stage and audience, performer and spectator, he would stop at nothing.
Screaming into the faces of unsuspecting viewers, actors bloodying themselves with knife slashes, hurling actual feces, or just sitting on their hands in silence for hours--it was all fair game. And what was the point of all of it? I'm not sure I know, completely. And how does this relate to Blake? Well...
The idea that an author (musician, etc.) will have some contextual framework for their art is hard to dismiss. Even stuff that claims to have no other context than life itself--like say the realist stories of someone like Raymond Carver--is unavoidably making certain distinctions about what does and does not constitute art. Carver would say that all it takes to be a writer is the willingness to stop and stare, and notice the detail of a sunset or the way someone snorts with laughter after a certain joke (bad paraphrase there). But then he would really get his back up when someone like John Barth would talk about formal experimentation in writing, deconstruction, etc.. because that wasn't what writing was, no. Anytime you are devoting entire essays to lecturing people on what art is not then you... are likely operating from a theory of some sort. Sorry Ray, though I love ya. We (particularly my 18 year old poetic self) are often tied to the idea of art being free, or outside, of the conventional definitions of order and logic. And that's fine. I think that good art will always contain some irreducable element--something of the contradiction and mystery of life. When you can reduce a piece of art to a message, no matter how moral and worth stating, that does seem like a lesser result. Actually, this element of 'mystery' is what Flannery O'Connor defined as the highest quality she aimed for in her writing. And to her, like Blake maybe, that was tied to a religous aspect to life, something that always went a little beyond human knowing. Here, the theory itself includes the irrational, so the art remains open. It works.
On my evals last semester, a student, on the suggestions page, wrote simply: "No More Cryptic Stories". I sympathized, a little, and the fact that the printed letters took up the entire page led me to know how serious he/she was about this. Sometimes the stuff we read can be baffling, can make you feel that the writer may be throwing shit at you, at least metaphorically. Going back to what a few people said during the 'poetry' blog, staying with the work, even in its uncertainty and contradiction, seems like one of the more important lessons that reading brings.