>>317865 (OP)The exact same sentiments were popular when horses were being replaced with cars; I imagine something similar when scriptoriums were replaced with the printing press. Significantly *not* when animal plows were replaced with industrial machinery - because the outcome mattered more than the sentiments behind it.
It's romanticism in the literal sense that these sentiments are coming from. In the 1800s and thereabouts the general sentiment of artistic (read: luxury) expression was finding and magnifying artificial sentiments in the face of a rapidly rationalised and optimised world - were how you felt about your day's work was rendered irrelevant.
So now the Idea and utility behind the art-artefact becomes the important part, because the barrier to entry for an idea to be expressed in the contemporary optimal form has now been drastically lowered.
Again back to the printing press - completely wrong bestiaries written and published by entrenched institutions have little utility when there are a variety of others available with greater accuracy and a lower price.
This is what progress feels like. If you weren't around for the internet revolution in the 90s, this is what it felt like. The incidental institutions and sentiments built up around them were shown to be cope; and the appeal of individual artefacts of low quality _because that was the only option_ was shown to be delusional.
To put it yet another way, artists are no longer the sole supplier of art-artefacts, much like the music hall is no longer the sole supplier of music artefacts. The market will shift and whoever insists on investing themselves in an *obsolete* production discipline will quite rightly be ground into the gears and left to starve.