Cutlery is, of course, a very different thing from artistic works. Has a machine ever created cutlery as beautiful as a human being can?

Well, conventionally a human being designs the cutlery, and a machine produces to that design.

And yes, they can be quite pretty.

What you see as the absolutely most beautify fork is in the eye of the beholder, of course.

Handmade cutlery is an artistic work. Machine made cutlery is an artistic work.

Remember, the benchmark for art is a banana taped to a wall.

the benchmark for art is the first banana taped to a wall.

I don't think there's any evidence that the famous banana was the first one to be taped to a wall.

It won’t always be inferior. Some items are just not profitable or too bespoke for mass production.

In what way do those imperfections make something like cutlery inferior?

I think there are many more examples of his point. Food, for example. McDonalds famously adds non-uniformity, scorch marks, etc to their bread and meat to make it appear as if it wasn't manufactured within small dimensional tolerances.

And yet many people pay small fortunes to get those small imperfections instead of the machine ones, nowadays considered collection items.

Yes, humans pay for all kinds of interesting quirks.