I think you would need to explain why you think pre-industrial civilization preferred "mastering the art" to "making money".
Painters sold their paintings or did commissions, musicians sold their compositions or wrote them on demand, glassblowers and blacksmiths worked to sell their ware.
I think it may be that you couldn't really change your status with money. It's not like today when you did something great and your wealth changes by orders of magnitude.
So your status came from being a master. Somebody in very high regard because he is practically irreplaceable. He brings us great clothes. Nobody else around can do it so well. And no, that doesn't mean you could charge a lot for them, because the market is too small and people who are buying from you are the people you depend on for getting the goods that you need.
This is a topic that can't even begin to be summarized in a HN comment.
In the past, it was far more common to subsidize the training of artisans, or at least ensure they were economically subsistent, because the culture recognized the value of aesthetic beauty toward achieving civilizational goals.
Today, in 2021, this doesn't happen so much. Primarily for two reasons: aesthetic relativism ("Beauty is just an opinion and all opinions are equally valid") and cost ("Why design beautiful buildings when ugly ones are cheaper?") Rather than pay more money to ensure that the market for craftsmen is stable, we'd prefer to save $20 and buy some plastic junk. Ditto for other art forms.
Painters sold their paintings or did commissions, musicians sold their compositions or wrote them on demand, glassblowers and blacksmiths worked to sell their ware.