He made a competing black that anyone can buy, too.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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I'm getting the feeling he really doesn't like Anish. Every page I've looked at has Anish mentioned. The anal apocalypse is especially for him. The glow in the dark pigment is free, if you can prove that you are associated with him to share the light.
Do they have some big feud going on?
most artists dislike the entire idea of copyrighting a color for the singular purpose of limiting its use to one person. some people care more about copyrights than others.
Pretty sure vantablack was patented not copyrighted. It's also possible that is wasn't either and just was really hard to produce. Afaik vantablack isn't really designed to be be painted and requires quite specialised equipment.
They sell it as a paint, however : "Controversy arose when Surrey Nanosystems granted Anish Kapoor exclusive rights to use Vantablack in artistic applications. Many artists voiced opposition to his monopoly over the substance."
Thats the beef. If you try to get or use it, Amish Kapoor will typically take legal action.
Also, hes never really made any compelling art with it either.
He's the guy who made that big silver sculpture in Chicago. He intensely dislikes that everyone calls it The Bean because he named it Cloud Gate. Really, he made a giant sculpture in a public place that is shaped like a massive shiny kidney bean and is big mad that people call it a bean. Seems like hes kind of a thin skinned baby.
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The company that makes the paint version of VantaBlack licensed it only to one guy to use, the art community felt that was unfair. Thus the pink, and I think a new black etc.etc.
does anyone like Anish Kapoor?
No
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Website seems to force a login to even browse the store?
Could be a vpn or location issue? It's just a listing for another super matte black this artist made to fuck with Anish.
Hitting the back button takes me back to the page I was visiting. An annoyance.
Disabling content blockers seems to prevent the behavior, but then you’ve disabled content blockers.
I experience similar broken site behavior from other online platforms, too. I suspect Shopify is trying to annoy users into not using adblockers.
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Disaster of a website. Just why?
I don't know how to answer that question. Because of the tides? Because of a love of dance? Because they knew you were coming?
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Culture Hustle's chrome makes not metal things look like metal, not metal colored, look like metal. Also Semple's glow pigments are intense.
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The SRGB color range isn't even close to bright enough to display how pink this color is, in case anyone's like "that's just pink"
How does one see it in person?
I bought some lol. It's a truly pretty, perfect pink.
I've made an unspeakable number of purchases from Culture Hustle over the last couple years for a variety of pigments and specialty paints (like Black 4.0 and glow in the dark and UV reactive pigments.) I paint board game minis for fun lol.
I was just thinking, I wonder how these would look used on minis. Do you have any photos to share using these pigments?
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From experience, you walk into the barbie isle in Walmart.
I dunno. The Tom Scott video said it's like doubling the jump from grey to the color you see.
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And since then, people have created even darker black pigments. So the man is left holding someone people will never want.
For what it's worth, Vantablack isn't a pigment, it's a process for applying carbon nanotubes that absorb light. They don't sell the "paint" part by itself because it requires special equipment and it finicky. They don't sell it because then a bunch of social media influencers would try to spray their bathrooms with the stuff and make a bunch of videos about how it doesn't live up to the hype.
The owner of the exclusive license to use it for art might be a douche who uses the licensing to make himself feel powerful, but there is a justifiable explanation for why the licensing exists in the first place.
The effect is also completely ruined if you handle it, and the broken off nanotubes from handling it are a serious health hazard. It's expensive, dangerous, extremely fragile and almost impossible to clean.
But like mostly, having seen "Anish Kapoor" (which is the real name of the installation where that dickhead debuted his vantablack art), it... sucks. It's impressive in photographs, incredibly lame in person. And, it can't be cleaned without ruining the coating! so the dust from all those people builds up and just ew. You can see overlapping outlines, in some cases you could pretty clearly see the shadows from the contours of the coated object because of all the accumulated dust.
(also, and just on a personal note, he took nine years and did absolutely nothing conceptually interesting with it. Seriously it was the early-2000s 3D movie of art. Just one gimmick, repeated over and over with no change to the formula. "Look, it's black". It felt more like an ad for the lab that developed the coating than an art exhibition). It would have been cool if he'd developed the process, but we all know he didn't, so it just fell so comically flat.)
How hard is it to paint an irregularly shaped object in vanteblack, suspend it in a weighted 5ft plexiglass sphere sitting on some ball bearings, and let viewer or motors rotate it so the changing silhouette fucks with perspective, like a 3d shadow puppet?
"That sounds like actual investment into the art. Howabout instead I vantablack a heap in the middle of a room, leave it uncovered an let people walk around it? Same effect but soooo much less work for me, Anish Kapoor's straw-filled bodydouble"
(Seriously though, it was so lame. Even in photos, the effect was disappointing.)
Edit: My charming partner has pointed out that literally everyone that hears about Vantablack comes up with more interesting applications than this shit.
examples:
- Playing around with the ambient reflected light to create images on the otherwise textureless black background
- Do a darkroom, have people walk through it on a plexiglass sheet suspended above the void
- Get statues of people performing elaborate sex acts on eachother. Paint them black. Put them against a black background. Call it "censorship" or something.
Bam. 30 seconds of brainstorming. And those are ignoring all the cool ideas about playing around with emissive light effects in a room with no reflections.
what the fuck is this even supposed to look like...? the entire point is that it turns an object essentially to its silhouette, and he couldn't come up with an interesting silhouette?
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a justifiable explanation for why the licensing exists in the first place.
"because people doing it wrong would make it look bad" is a terrible reason. I'm fairly certain I can buy an OLED TV and mess with the settings and make the picture look horrendous - time to create a restrictive license on who gets to buy TVs?
That's not the reason. The reason is that vantablack potentially has some military applications so the company that invented it isn't allowed to sell it. They got permission to collaborate with one artist to promote it. Amish has to ship his art to the company to get it covered in Vantablack. Everyone blaming him for a government decision just because he was an asshole about it.
Carbon nanotubes are real? I thought that shit was invented for upgrades and repairs in No Man's Sky..
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The artist is Stuart Semple.
Not sure why we're only hearing the name of the lesser cool artist.
Yeah I thought semple was cool too until it became apparent he's a grifter. He started a Kickstarter years ago to build an adobe replacement suite of software. I believe he claimed there would be test builds available several times for at least two years:
He basically has been unresponsive for months at a time and has set many deadlines that haven't been hit. I don't think that software will ever happen and I don't think he ever truly planned to build it.
I think this is being overly judgemental. He originally created his reputation by going to war against Pantone, a company which holds a near monopoly on colours. At first it was patches to get Adobe to use colours it locked users out of, which he then expanded into Freetone, a colour palette that is free for anyone except Adobe.
Looking at his other behaviour (such as legally changing his name to Amish Kapoor to piss off Anish Kapoor who sued him for colour infringement) suggests that he's messy, rather than a grifter.
Pinkest Pink | FREETONE | LIBERATING COLOURS SINCE 2016 | CultureHustle - https://culturehustle.com/products/freetone
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Yeah, fuck him! That gatekeeping asshole.
Luckilly, I can stare into the abyss without help. But still, fuck you! You don't copyright COLORS you fucking twat.
If the story is true, Anish Kapoor got his hands on some and dipped his finger in the pink, flipping off Stuart.
In response, Stuart released a glitter made of shards of glass. Lol
Apparently Anish posted that on his instagram! Mentioned on his wiki page under "vantablack controversy": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anish_Kapoor
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I want the pinkest green. Or the greenest pink? I forgot how it works but one of those colors is technically the other color where it lies on the light spectrum and our brains just freak out and create a different color.
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thought the issue is that ventablack is extremely dangerous to use, and Anish was allowed to use it as a publicity stunt and with proper liability forms. it's not a paint that should be available to the public.
however, the problem is that Anish is a bit of a cunt about it and no one likes him.
I will never remember his name. He will always be The Bean Guy to me.
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