The Black That Only One Artist Can Legally Paint With

Vantablack was developed by Surrey NanoSystems in 2014 for aerospace optics. A forest of vertical carbon nanotubes — each roughly 14 to 50 microns tall, trapping more than 99.96 percent of incoming visible light — makes a surface that reads to the eye as a hole. Look at a Vantablack-coated object and its contours disappear; the visual system reports a shape with no features.

In early 2016 the sculptor Anish Kapoor signed an exclusivity deal with Surrey NanoSystems for the sole artistic use of the coating. No other artist could buy or work with it. The announcement triggered one of the stranger public fights in recent art history. Stuart Semple, a British painter, retaliated with 'Pinkest Pink', a fluorescent pigment sold with a checkbox on the order form affirming the buyer was not Anish Kapoor and would not share it with him. Kapoor posted a photograph of his middle finger dipped in the pigment, captioned 'Up yours #pink.'

The deeper complaint was about principle. A pigment claimed by one artist is not exactly new — Yves Klein patented International Klein Blue in 1960 — but Kapoor's deal was an exclusivity of access to the material itself, not just a trademark on a recipe. Painters circulated open letters. Trade publications debated whether an industrial coating was now, in effect, copyrighted.

Surrey NanoSystems has since released Vantablack S-VIS, a sprayable version, under different licensing. In 2019 Brian Wardle's lab at MIT grew a blacker material — a carbon-nanotube forest on chlorine-etched aluminum foil, absorbing 99.995 percent of visible light. Kapoor was never offered rights. His original Vantablack arrangement still stands.