In 2014, the blackest material ever manufactured was introduced to the world. It is called Vantablack, developed by a British company, Surrey NanoSystems, and is composed of carbon nanotubes so minute and densely packed that light enters between them and virtually never emerges: it absorbs 99.965% of the light it receives. A surface coated with it ceases to be perceived as a surface. A three-dimensional object painted in Vantablack appears as a void, an absence cut into space. The eye finds nothing to grasp, as almost no light returns to provide information about the relief. It is, quite literally, the closest we have come to witnessing nothingness.
In 2016, something occurred that turned a technical feat into an art world scandal. The sculptor Anish Kapoor obtained exclusivity from the company to use Vantablack in the artistic sphere. Only he, among all the artists on the planet, could work with the blackest black. The reaction was one of indignation: how can anyone lay claim to a colour? A colour belongs to everyone, it was said, a common heritage of human perception, and privatising it for a single artist seemed a form of almost metaphysical greed. Pigment as private property.
The response arrived from another artist, Stuart Semple, and was as elegant as it was amusing. He manufactured and offered for sale his own extreme pigments—the pinkest pink, and subsequently a series of highly absorbent blacks available to anyone—with a single condition of purchase: he would sell them to everyone except Anish Kapoor. Upon acquiring them, the buyer was required to declare that they were not Kapoor, that they did not represent him, and that the product would not end up in his possession. The vengeance of open access against closed access, delivered with humour. The story is compelling, which explains its widespread circulation. Yet, recounted in this manner, it obscures the most intriguing aspect, which is also the most uncomfortable for our intuition regarding colours.
For Kapoor did not purchase a colour. That is impossible, and it is necessary to explain why. No one can own black, just as no one can own red or the concept of darkness. What Kapoor obtained was the exclusive right to the artistic use of a specific, patented material, the property of a company: a coating technology that is not even a paint applied with a brush, but a technical process applied in a laboratory onto a prepared substrate. He did not appropriate a perceptual experience. He appropriated access to an industrial product that produces that experience. And those two things, which indignation conflates, are radically distinct.
The distinction is not a technicality: it is the heart of the matter. A colour, as an experience, cannot be owned because it is not a thing; it is a phenomenon that occurs between a surface, a light, and an eye. What can be owned is the material medium that provokes that phenomenon in a new way. And this is where the case ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a mirror of something much more general. The history of art is, to a large extent, a history of access to materials. Ultramarine blue, made from lapis lazuli brought from afar, was for centuries so expensive that it was reserved for the most sacred mantles: not because the blue belonged to anyone, but because the material that produced it was scarce and costly. Tyrian purple clothed emperors for the same reason. Whoever controlled the material effectively controlled who could use that colour, without the need to possess the colour in the abstract.
Vantablack merely makes visible, and extreme, a structure that was always there. A colour is not privatised: access to the material that makes it possible is controlled. The difference from ultramarine is that, previously, the barrier was natural scarcity and cost, whereas now it is a patent and an exclusivity contract. The mechanism has become legal where it was once economic or geographical, but the logic remains the same: the colour continues to belong to everyone, and the material continues to belong to someone.
That is why the indignant question—who does black belong to?—is, fundamentally, poorly posed, and that is the small shift I am interested in leaving behind. Black belongs to no one, and it never will. What has an owner is the bottle, the formula, the patent, the process. When an artist buys the most expensive pigment on the market, they are not buying a colour: they are buying the material permission to use it, just as the Renaissance painter bought their lapis lazuli. Perception is free; the material is not. And perhaps the most honest thing that can be said about the entire episode is that confusing those two things—believing that whoever controls the bottle controls the colour—is, precisely, the error that makes the business possible.
On open conversation
This text touches, from a slight angle, on a question that occupies me: the distinction between the material and the experience, between what can be owned and what cannot. The Vantablack case is an anecdote, but it reveals an old structure: whoever controls access to the material effectively controls who uses the colour. If anyone wishes to intervene from the history of pigments, intellectual property, studio practice, or colour theory, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Surrey NanoSystems. “Vantablack — Our Story” and coating data sheet (vantablack.co.uk). Absorption up to 99.965% of light; vertically aligned carbon nanotubes.
“Fighting the Bean: The Saga of Vantablack, Stuart Semple & Anish Kapoor”. Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts (artistic use exclusivity, 2016).
Culture Hustle (Stuart Semple): “World’s Pinkest Pink” (2016), “Black 2.0” (2017); Anish Kapoor exclusion clause.
“Artist Makes ‘Blackest Black Paint in the World’ to Protest Anish Kapoor”. Frieze, 31 January 2019 (Black 3.0 Kickstarter campaign and anti-Kapoor clause).