The first robot sculptor appeared in Carrara in 2005. Now there are about 30, and the total worldwide is around 100. Two men play outsize roles in this rapidly evolving business. One is Massari, the more evangelistic of the two. His corporate mothership, publicly traded Litix SpA, trumpets Massari’s vision of the future on the first page of a slick marketing brochure. “We Don’t Need Another Michelangelo: In Italy, It’s Robots’ Turn to Sculpt,” proclaims the newspaper headline he reproduced from a New York Times piece on his company.
The other man is a bluff Midwesterner named Jim Durham. In Carrara, they’d known him for decades. He often bought stone there for his thriving fabrication business in America. Still, the Italians must not have grasped what truly drove him. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been so surprised when he completed a yearslong stalk and, last Oct. 29, snapped up Franco Cervietti, the most respected carving atelier in Italy.
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Yet the old artisanal community was withering even then. “The work can be sporadic,” McMartin said, “sometimes with long periods of unemployment.” It was also hard and poorly paid, which discouraged some artists from passing on their skills. “There were master craftsmen in Pietrasanta who would deny their own children access to their studios,” she said. The robots’ arrival simply sped up a decline that was already underway.
Then the inevitable happened: Where there had been too many carvers, now there were too few.
Robot sculpture often needs hand-finishing. The Koons ballerina, after 20 months with the robot, would probably go through a year of manual finishing, maybe longer. It would be exacting work—getting up into the lace to finish the holes and hollow out the flounces. Such work would be too delicate for a robot. With the number of carving studios reduced, the surviving ones, with their veteran artisans, have become increasingly valuable—none more so than the atelier of Franco Cervietti.
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