I don’t doubt that, in at least some cases, the person involved is very much in it for the artistic element. When I referred to ‘economics’ I was thinking of situations along the lines of the vibrant industry in incredibly low cost reproduction(and some original) paintings that sprung up in China. Oil painting is very much something one thinks of as an artistic activity that people go into for creative reasons; but one also suspects that an operation that can get a handpainted oil-on-canvas of my choice to me on relatively short notice for under $50 is probably a bit of a sweatshop operation.
In this case, while I hope they’ve avoided it; I could easily imagine sufficient demand for lacquer boxes(that don’t necessarily have to be unique, just come in enough variations that a given customer has their choice and doesn’t end up having to buy duplicates) and inability to command high prices based on existing fame as an artisan could easily lead to going from doing it for the artistic expression to toiling over as many units in parallel as you can endure(since each one takes so long; that would be the only way to make quota) with a bare minimum of variation; which would not be pleasant.
I don’t know one way or the other; which is why it was in the form of a question; but we have examples of both precision labor that doesn’t get ‘craft’ status and of artistic labor driven by demand into something as close to assembly line production as the nature of the medium allows; so it seemed like a definite possibility; especially for someone without the reputation and/or very high end skill to command relatively high prices for works of art; rather than piece rates for “handmade lacquer box”.
