The Blackest Black, or: Anger Makes Creative
Surrey NanoSystems' super black paint. Courtesy of Surrey NanoSystems.
Imagine a black that is so black that it absorbs 99.96% of visible light, making three dimensional objects look flat if you stand directly in front of them. Impossible? Well, take a look at Anish Kapoor’s sculptures painted in Vantablack that are currently on display in Venice, at the Gallerie dell’Accademia and at the Palazzo Manfrin. The stuff is pretty scary – one of Kapoor’s work, Descent into Limbo, looks like a large, gaping black hole in the ground that is about to suck you in.
Anish Kapoor at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice
Vantablack was developed by the British company Surrey for the military and aerospace. Anish Kapoor read about it in a newspaper, approached the company and managed to get a monopoly: he is the only artist in the world allowed to use the company’s Vantablack for his art. Kapoor could afford this because he is one of the most influential and successful artists working today. Maybe you’ve come across one of his super popular mirror sculptures that create fantastical optical illusions.
Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate - nicknamed ‘The Bean’
But his monopoly for Vantablack really irritated a lot of other artists. They protested that it was not fair for one artist to have exclusive rights to a colour. The British artist Stuart Semple found an original way to get back at Kapoor: in 2016, he created the “pinkest pink” and made it available for purchase on his webpage to anyone - but Kapoor.
Kapoor retorted that he had earned his exclusive right because Vantablack is extremely complicated to apply and he had worked with NanoSystems to make it useable for his art. But Semple didn’t buy this argument and went on to create an affordable super black with a similar flattening effect as Vantablack – again available to anyone but Kapoor. Another artist, Diemut Strebe, even teamed up with an aeronautics and astronautics professor, Brian L. Wardle of Boston’s MIT (one the world’s leading science and technology universities), to create an even blacker black than Vantablack. They succeeded, presenting the new “blackest black” that absorbs 99.995% percent of light in a piece of art called The Redemption of Vanity: covered in the new black, a huge diamond seemingly appears to be a worthless, flat, black spot. This makes you wonder: how do we attach monetary value to things? Strebe and Wardle have made the process for creating their black available to any artist who wants to use it. . .
Diemut Strebe, The Redemption of Vanity
Amazing how creative people get when they are annoyed!