I'm listening to The Hunchback of Notre Dame and struggling so hard to follow Hugo's meandering philosophizing about history, the shape of France, etc and right now stuck on him saying that the printing press was the death of good architecture and that journeymen replaced sculptures and plain glass to painted windows, and it's just... those artists were probably so often also the journeymen. They're probably just as upset about going from their living involving art to no longer getting commissions for anything but the most basic. I could be up my own ass about this, but I feel like the divide between the artist and the plain worker who does the thing lies largely in the disuse of the artistic form. I think of those videos of 'so few people know how to create this thing and the art is dying' and how it was the job of the people who did that art to make the thing just like any journeymen until easier ways of doing a thing were found and, cheaper (or more sturdy or convenient or some other reasonable thing that sacrifices art for the new, plainer object), are all they requested.
It's such a weird little thing to get hooked up on but here I am, mourning the artists who wanted to keep doing the sculpting and painting of their trades and to pass it on, but it was simply no longer in their demand XDXD