The Blackest Black vs. The Pinkest Pink

In 2016, Surrey Nanosystems created a substance known as “The Blackest Black.” Immediately, a British artist purchased the exclusive rights to use the “Vantablack” substance in art. The art world was angry and started developing ways to strike back. In this episode, we talk about Vantablack, Anish Kapoor, Stuart Semple and more. Then we chat with Hypnotist, Magician and Entrepreneur, CJ Johnson!

If you’ve ever visited Chicago, you may have seen a famous piece of art in Millennium Park that’s commonly known as “The Bean.” The actual name of the piece is “Cloud Gate,” a sculpture by Anish Kapoor – and it’s a reflective bean-shaped blob that reflects the city around it in strange ways with its curved polished stainless steel surface.

People in Chicago either love it or hate it. In fact, much of Kapoor’s work is polarizing this way. Many Chicagoans see it as a tourist trap with little to no cultural relevance. Others love it as a piece of the city that’s now existed for 20 years. It beat out 30 other pieces of art that the city was considering for the space and has been featured in tons of photos, television and film set in Chicago. Kapoor hates it when people call it “The Bean.” But Kapoor doesn’t have the best reputation, so people enjoy continuing to call it that. 

If you look at Anish Kapoor’s work, a lot of it deals with objects and how they are perceived. And to be more specific, he enjoys how that perception changes as someone interacts with and moves around the object. He also has done a lot of work using different odd materials, like wax and also has a lot of work centered around blood, nothingness and the female anatomy.  So when a company called Surrey Nanosystems created a new coating material in its UK Lab, Kapoor took note. 

Surrey Nanosystems created Vantablack in 2014 and it was colloquially known as “the blackest black.” It’s a pigment coating for materials that absorbs almost all light – 99.965% of light. For reference, a normal black matte paint absorbs around 80% of light. This is why you can see shadows and relief on a thing that’s painted standard black. But if you look at something coated with Vantablack, it’s almost eerie – you can’t make out any changes in the painted surface. There are no shadows and all of the relief and curves within the coated space completely disappear. Anything you coat with Vantablack looks like a silhouette of the object. As an example – picture a piece of crumpled up aluminum foil. If you coated part of it with Vantablack, you’d no longer see any crumples or creases in that area. It would look totally smooth to the eye. Because all of the various surfaces that reflect light in different directions are just hidden. Without the reflection, you lose all of the relief. If you coat something in Vantablack and hold it in front of another Vantablack surface, it completely disappears from view. It’s the blackest black. 

One misnomer about Vantablack is that it’s a paint. It’s not. It’s a substance – a coating process that uses quite a bit more science than putting it in a tube to sell to consumers. And that has to do with what it actually is. The best way to describe it is it’s a forest of tiny little black tubes, sticking up and down. They’re hollow and so small they’re not visible to the naked eye. When light hits the end of these tubes, it gets trapped down inside and therefore doesn’t bounce off the surface like a normal flat object. In fact, the word “vanta” is an acronym, standing for “vertically aligned nanotube arrays.” When something needs to be coated with Vantablack, it has to be done at their lab, where they first coat it with a material that’s conducive to sort of “growing” the nanotubes. And once the surface is installed, if it’s disturbed and the nanotubes are knocked over, it loses this amazing light absorbing properties. 

Some of the first orders of Vantablack were to meet demands of the aerospace and military. But when it came to using the material in art, Anish Kapoor somehow was able to pay Surrey Nanosystems enough money to secure the sole rights to use it in art applications. Now we don’t know how much that amount was, but Kapoor is an incredible rich artist, having installed public art pieces all over the world. So the total is probably in the millions. And when the art world heard that he had bought the sole rights to this pigment, they lost their minds. 

So Anish Kapoor, this wealthy artist, purchased the exclusive rights to be the only person allowed to use this amazing new substance in art applications. I should say “Sir Anish Kapoor.” Yes, this guy was knighted. And when that news broke of his deal with Surrey Nanosystems, the art world was incensed. They felt that it wasn’t right to claim rights to a color. 

For Anish, this was the perfect material to suit the type of art he was already creating. He was quoted in Art Forum Magazine as saying “When we imagine our own interiors, we have a sense that each of us carries a dark, inner, and quiet, or not so quiet, place within ourselves. To have that out there phenomenologically in the world is quite unnerving.”

But the response from other artists was disbelief. Christian Furr, a painter, told the Daily Mail Newspaper, “I’ve never heard of an artist monopolizing a material. This black is like dynamite in the art world…. It isn’t right that it belongs to one man.”

Kapoor’s response, as reporting in The Guardian was that he wanted it to belong exclusively to him “-because it’s a collaboration, because I am wanting to push them to a certain use for it. I’ve collaborated with people who make things out of stainless steel for years and that’s exclusive.”

A lot of this also probably revolved around the fact that many of these people didn’t understand what Vantablack was. They were imagining it as a paint that could be applied by anyone. Not a scientifically created surface that had to be grown microscopically by professionals. I mean when this stuff was first invented and when Kapoor bought the rights, it was only possible to make a tiny 2cm square at a time. So the outrage was instant and fierce, but mostly just on social media. Once the technology was streamlined, so they could apply it to larger surfaces, videos of Vantablack started being circulating, the question – even from outside the art world – was “Where can I get this stuff? I want to put it on my shoes or my car.” And then the answer, which should have been, “You can’t because it has to be lab grown on the surface and it’s incredibly expensive,” was instead “You can’t because one guy bought the rights to it and doesn’t want you to have it.” Both answers were true, but one was much more interesting than the other.

In one case, an Artist who lives in Dorset, England, took it further than just social media. In 2016, after the news broke about the substance and Kapoor’s business deal, Stuart Semple was sitting in his art studio angry reading the news. So he decided to strike back. If he couldn’t use Vantablack, he would create something that Anish Kapoor couldn’t use. So in December of that year, he created the opposite – the brightest pink he could create. He actually worked with a team to combine pigments until they created the brightest hue of pink imaginable. He called it, “The Pinkest Pink.” The heading on the web page was “Liberating Colors Since 2016.” On the page, Semple says, “I don’t think it’s really very fair! We all remember kids at school who wouldn’t share their colouring pencils, but then they ended up on their own with no friends. It’s cool, Anish can have his black. But the rest of us will be playing with the rainbow!” For $10, you could buy 50 grams of the stuff in powdered form and all you have to do is mix it with water. The description of the product is very clear. This product is available for sale as long as you are NOT Anish Kapoor. It goes further to say:

“*Note: By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.”

Here’s Semple in his own words:

It was a very punk way of fighting back. And he sold a lot of the stuff. He didn’t make any money – he sold it at cost. This was all about the statement. But it was only a couple weeks before Anish Kapoor posted to instagram. It was a post from December 23, 2016 and had the caption “Up yours #pink.” It was photo of a jar of The Pinkest Pink and Anish Kapoor’s middle finger, dipped in Pink, flipping off the camera.

Semple’s response was that “It’s obviously very disappointing that Anish has illegally got his hands on the world’s pinkest paint. If anyone knows who is behind sharing it with him it would be good if they could come forward – Anish is still very much at large, not just with the blackest black but now the stolen pinkest pink. Luckily he’s failed to get his hands on the world’s most glittery glitter, so we would urge purchasers to refrain from sharing any with him or his associates.” 

Also – that wasn’t a joke. Stuart Semple also created the world’s most glittery glitter. It was a tiny jar of glitter made with actual tiny shards of glass, which he called, “Diamond Dust.” 

In order to help provide artists with the blackest black paint available, Stuart worked with scientists and other artists to create Black 2.0 – the world’s flattest, mattest black art material. It was acrylic paint, so it wasn’t nearly as black as Vantablack, 

, but it was a paint that was affordable and useable. Since then, he’s improved the absorption of the paint and he’s up to Black 4.0., “The Blackest Black Paint” in the known universe.” It’s a product seven years in the making and when you hold it against other black paint, it’s noticeably less reflective. And it’s available to everyone. As long as your name is NOT Anish Kapoor. The Internet Says it’s True.

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