The ancient Tuscan town has successfully optimized its seasonal supply chain to meet the insatiable global demand for deeply inoffensive lobby centerpieces. Forecasters expect a massive year-over-year increase in the export of featureless marble ovoids.
The Tuscan municipality, whose quarries once supplied Michelangelo with the very material that would eventually be wrested into the divine agony of the Pieta; which served as the literal foundation for Giovanni Pisano’s agonizingly intricate fourteenth-century pulpit at Pistoia; and which, somewhat inexplicably, provided the primary set dressing for the 1994 live-action cinematic adaptation of The Flintstones, has now entirely optimized its supply chain to meet the global demand for polished ovoids.
Forecasters at the regional arts council project a 400 percent year-over-year increase in the summer output of smooth, abstract swoops that convey absolutely nothing beyond a vague sense of fiduciary stability; an industrial triumph that finally resolves the agonizing, centuries-long struggle of the Western canon by entirely abandoning the human form in favor of shapes that will not distract passing venture capitalists on their way to the elevator bank.
We have fundamentally transcended the exhausting burden of capturing mortal suffering in stone, arriving instead at a streamlined paradigm where we simply sand down the corners of a monolith until it resembles a very expensive bar of soap.
Where once the summer months brought a flurry of tortured visionaries seeking to extract profound truths from the very marrow of the earth, the current seasonal boom is largely characterized by a hyper-efficient assembly line of local fabricators executing the emailed CAD files of absent conceptualists; a mechanized process that ensures each fifty-ton chunk of primordial geology is safely stripped of any threatening semiotic weight, buffed to a mirrored sheen, and entirely divested of authorial intent before it is crated, shipped, and ultimately deposited in front of a mid-tier pharmaceutical headquarters in Dusseldorf.
The town’s mayor heralded the economic milestone at a press conference on Tuesday, standing triumphantly before a newly commissioned public work—a featureless, slightly asymmetrical torus that manages, with breathtaking audacity, to mean considerably less than the empty air it displaces—thus confirming that the grand, turbulent trajectory of European plastic arts has finally culminated in the absolute perfection of the decorative paperweight.