Black in business

By Zoe Castleden

Looking at something coated in Vantablack is like staring into the void. It is not just “black,” like a cat is black, or like ink is black. It tricks your brain in ways that no normal paint, ink or dye does. In photos, it looks straight up fake.

It is a pigment with huge visual impact – but it didn’t start out as art at all. Its invention demonstrates how technology can become culture, but not without a cost to artistic liberty.

Vantablack’s secret is in its name: VANTA – Vertically Aligned NanoTube Array. A Vantablack coating is like a super-microscopic shagpile carpet of carbon nanotubes. Light goes in and – like crumbs dropped on a shagpile carpet – it can’t get back out. The light bounces between the tubes, eventually dissipating into heat. Vantablack absorbs 99.96% of all light that hits it. It is the blackest substance ever made.

Although it is visually striking, Vantablack was originally developed for purely technical reasons. Black as we see it isn’t really a colour in the sense that red, blue or orange are. It’s a relative absence of reflected light. There are many uses for completely non-reflective materials. Vantablack was developed by Surrey NanoSystems for use on satellites, to calibrate their instrumentation. Something covered in vantablack approximates a “black body” – a physics term for an ideal object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation. Vantablack is therefore being used in a variety of scientific and technological contexts. For example, black bodies are used to calibrate infrared sensors on satellites, which are used for weather reporting. But it didn’t take long for the technology to be noticed by the art world.

Etherial Forces 6

By Debora Pollarini

Vantablack caught the eye of Anish Kapoor, a sculptor and installation artist. It fit his style perfectly. A 1992 work of his, ‘Descent into Limbo,’ featured a hole on the ground, painted black on the inside and meant to resemble a pitch-dark void in the middle of the floor. Vantablack would allow him to achieve the same effect completely in 2D. Anish Kapoor experimented with Vantablack for two years. Then he did something that shocked the art world. In 2016, he struck a deal with Surrey Nanosystems. Kapoor bought exclusive rights for use of the material in art.

This was not the first time a colour had been legally restricted. Yves Klein patented his own blue in 1960 - you can see it at the Tate Modern.

But unlike Klein, Kapoor did not create his colour. He bought the exclusive rights to someone else’s creation.

Etherical Forces 1

By Debora Pollarini

Christian Furr, a painter, said in an interview: “I was displeased that an artist was apparently monopolising a material… On a metaphysical level you could say it was like someone owning death.”

Stuart Semple, another artist, started the hashtag #sharetheblack on Instagram in response to Kapoor’s monopolisation of vantablack. Semple had been creating pigments for his own works for 15 years, but the Vantablack situation changed his perspective. “I was making the pigments but I was just going to use them for my own work, but the Anish thing made me realize that hoarding stuff so you are the only person that can have it is not very nice…” Semple said. He subsequently released a pink pigment he had been working on to the public, but with one major stipulation on the product page:

“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.”

Naturally, it did not manage to stay out of Anish Kapoor’s hands for long – he posted a picture of his middle finger covered in Semple’s pink to his Instagram page.

Kapoor’s exclusive rights to Vantablack have led to other artists working to develop their own super-blacks that are accessible to all artists. Stuart Semple has made Black 3.0, a matte black acrylic paint developed collaboratively with other artists. Christian Furr worked with Imperial College researchers and the Science Museum to develop 7Black, a nanotube coating similar to Vantablack.

Neither of these are quite as black as Vantablack’s 99.96% light absorption. Nonetheless, they also have the unreal, eye-catching effect Kapoor wanted to keep to himself.

Vantablack sits at the intersection of art and science. While the story around it can seem like petty drama (some of it undoubtedly was petty drama), it gives valuable insight into what the intersections between art, technology – and a little bit of litigiousness – might look like in the future. ■