THERE IS A NEW COLOR.
Sample of 'Vantablack' provided to the New York Times by Surrey NanoSystems.
It’s called “Vantablack” (surely we could have done a little better with the nomenclature here) and artist Anish Kapoor owns it. Sorry Crayola, sorry Benjamin Moore, and most importantly, sorry global art community, Kapoor isn’t willing to share his new toy.
According to Brigid Delaney’s stellar article on the subject in the Guardian, Kapoor discovered this pigment after hearing about NanoSystem’s new material: “the pigment is comprised of microscopic stems of colour that are 300 times as tall as they are wide, so that about 99.6% of all life ‘just gets trapped in the network of standing segments, […] It’s literally as if you could disappear into it.’”
Because of limitations in Vantablack’s density, Kapoor could only use limited amounts of the material at a time. Kapoor decided to collaborate with NanoSystems to gain exclusive rights to the material and start producing the pigment in greater volume.
Delaney’s article (please read it in full) is a lot to absorb. For example, in the article Kapoor makes the argument that his ownership of Vantablack has caused a kerfuffle simply because the color is black-toned. “The problem is that colour is so emotive – especially black… I don’t think the same response would occur if it was white,” Kapoor declared. And, “It’s the ‘psycho side’ of black [makes] us want to possesses it.”
On his argument, I call bullshit. I don’t care if the new color is white toned, black toned, or tangerine toned, the blackness of Vantablack isn’t the cause for upset in the art community. Rather, it is the idea that one artist could own complete, unfettered access to a material no other artist can explore.
The Vantablack debate is a contemporary example of an ageless debate in art regarding innovation. Is a work of art genius because it is original? Is original even possible? If you could break a painting or an idea into its percentage of original content versus its percentage of derivative content, where would real art sit on the divide? Is “great art” 80% original and 20% derivative? 90/10?
As we often find with subjects in art and culture, there is no satisfyingly conclusive or objective measurement of great art. There is no way to decouple pastiche from originality in large part because our brains’ don’t work that way. Our life experience is inherently predicated on our past, even a newborn’s proclivities are based on his accidental genetics – and the argument doesn’t even need to go back that far!
The beauty of the creative process is evolving and transforming prior experiences and old ideas into something new and resonate. By sequestering a new material for exclusive use, Kapoor is cock-blocking the inherently collaborative nature of art and, as such, curtailing the evolution of an artistic dialogue with Vantablack that could very well have inspired more prolific cultural change.