Paper short abstract:

Through a case study of the scandal around artist Anish Kapoor's rights to Vantablack, a black carbon substance, this paper explores the histories of controlling colour and the military meanings of this black, arguing for an understanding of the material as absorbing light, heat, and time.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, the British artist Anish Kapoor caused a minor art world scandal when he acquired the exclusive right to paint with "Vantablack"—a matte black carbon substance grown on a substrate that absorbs 99.965% of visible light to create the effect of a gaping, heat-absorbing hole wherever it is applied. This "blackest black," developed and patented by Surrey NanoSystems, is both material and immaterial. It has the capacity to disappear—a boon for military applications such as thermal camouflage—and the ability to absorb heat; these transformative characteristics arrest time, a temporal quality that was one of Kapoor's motivations for working with the substance. Given these properties and routes of Vantablack, Kapoor's monopoly on artistic applications of the substance were met with various forms of public outcry, the patent containing within it an argument about the right transformation of materials from nature into technology (and art). Expanding on Marilyn Strathern's work on substance and patents and Michael Taussig's writing on the sacred properties of colour, this paper analyzes this scandal from the perspective of the anthropology of art and extraction. Focusing on the questions that Vantablack's material transformations raise about the proper relationships between artistic materials, colour, and property in Euro-American contemporary art worlds, this paper reframes the scandal in relation to the history of color and patents in the art world. Moving from Kapoor's monopoly to artist Stuart Semple's response of a democratized "pinkest pink," this paper re-materializes colour as property in both legal and cultural senses.