This may be a non issue, since the concept is both relatively modern and somewhat artificial. My books say that Beethoven was the first to insist that he was an "artist" and not a skilled artisan. Combine this with W B Yeats' claim that a poet is nothing but a person who arranges words in a way that readers can inject meaning into and you have a craftsman whose work is widely accessable and stands the test of time. The question then becomes "Why are these works accessable and why have they lasted?" IMHO many of the leading lights of the last 100+ years will be ignored 200 years from now.

All art is communication of some kind. If we understood why some art is great and other isn't, advertising would be an exact science. That is unacceptable.

John in Kansas said that Rodin was probably not a nice man. Neither were Robert Frost, Richard Wagner, or a host of others. Very sucessful artists tend to do whatever they do at the expense of everything else in life. As for the complaint that Rodin seldom made the finished product with his own hands, read the biography. He thought that was a job for technicians. He considered the design to be his major work.