When Two Shades Go To War
In the black corner: Anish Kapoor, master of massive sculptures, using voids and negative space for inspiration. In the pink corner: Stuart Semple, king of the giant canvas, drawing on colourful pop culture for inspiration.
The handbags-at-dawn starts with the invention of Vantablack by Surrey NanoSystems – a black so black that all light is absorbed, creating what looks like a blank void to the human eye.
Pretty tempting for any artist, including Kapoor. He puts the call in to see if he can use it, but the technology is so advanced and expensive to apply, it’s a no-go for commercial use. The company egg-heads go back to the drawing board and come up with a cheaper, easier-to-apply version. Kapoor gets a call back, the contract is signed and now he has exclusive rights to use Vantablack in his art. He’s giddy with delight. But others aren’t so happy.
Many artists believe Vantablack should be available to everyone, not just one person. Kapoor is subsequently beaten up in the press and on social media. Somehow in all this artist-bashing, the information is twisted and people start to think that he has the sole rights to the actual colour black in all its shades.
One of those confused, misled people is Stuart Semple’s mum. She thinks Vantablack is a paint - i.e. a pigment an artist would use – and that Anish Kapoor is keeping it all for himself, the selfish bugger. She tells her son; he’s not impressed. He’s famous for working with colour and wants to try Vantablack for himself.
Stuart Semple gets in contact with Surrey NanoSystems, but they tell him that using it is out of the question. Kapoor has the only rights to use it. So since he refuses to share Vantablack, Semple decides to invent his own colour and sell it to everyone… apart from you-know-who.
Pinkest Pink is born – an ultra-fluorescent paint which Semple flogs on his website, with the accompanying message: ‘This ultra-bright paint by Stuart Semple is available to everyone except Anish Kapoor (who won’t share his black!)’.
Semple thinks he’ll sell only a few of the Pinkest Pink. He goes on to shift 5000. Artists who buy it create their work then share it online with the hashtag #sharetheblack – attracting the attention of Kapoor.
In response, Kapoor purchases Pinkest Pink, sticks his middle finger in it, takes a pic and posts it on Instagram. Cue social media meltdown. The post attracts more than 1400 comments, most of them unsupportive towards Kapoor.
Attention turns back to Semple, with hundreds of artists now asking him to produce a blacker-than-black pigment that they could all use. Lo and behold, Black 1.0 hit the shelves in early-2017. But Semple isn’t happy with the result, so he sends 1000 samples to artists all over the world – including many who had used #sharetheblack and asks them for help to make the pigment darker.
The result of this collaboration is Black 2.0, a super-badass black that’s non-toxic and affordable. It may not be quite as ‘voidy’ as Vantablack, but it is available to everyone. Oh, except Anish Kapoor of course.
To date Anish Kapoor has only used Vantablack once. He produced a limited-edition watch that costs almost as much as a family house. Stuart Semple, on the other hand, has just opened a retrospective of his work in a gallery in a fashionable part of London. It would seem that picking a fight with a globally renowned artist is extremely good for business.
Photo by Daniel Cheung on Unsplash