The Blackest Black: How Anish Kapoor's Exclusive Deal Sparked an Art World Revolt

In February 2016, the British sculptor Anish Kapoor did something no artist had really tried before. He didn't buy a rare pigment or a painting made from it. He bought exclusive rights to use a color that a nanotechnology company had built for satellites and stealth jets. Vantablack was never meant to end up in a gallery. Within months, another artist had launched the world's pinkest pink, sold to "anyone who is not Anish Kapoor," and dipped his own middle finger in it just to prove a point. The blackest black in the world had become one of the pettiest, most revealing feuds art has produced in years.

A material built for spy satellites, not sculpture

Surrey NanoSystems, a small British engineering firm, developed Vantablack in 2014. The name is a portmanteau: VANTA stands for "vertically aligned nanotube array," and the material lives up to it. At its most effective, Vantablack absorbs up to 99.965% of visible light hitting it head-on at 663 nanometers, according to measurements published by Gamma Scientific.

Nobody built this for artists. Vantablack was designed to line the inside of space telescopes and satellite instruments, where stray light bouncing around a lens can ruin a sensitive reading. Because the coating also swallows ultraviolet and infrared radiation, useful for stealth applications, the UK classifies it as a dual-use material subject to export control. Surrey NanoSystems has never sold it to the public. Its customers are vetted companies, research labs, and a handful of universities and museums buying small samples for education.

How a forest of nanotubes swallows light

The mechanism is almost architectural. Vantablack is a dense forest of carbon nanotubes grown standing straight up, packed so tightly that light entering the gaps between them has almost nowhere to go. Photons bounce from tube wall to tube wall, losing energy with every collision, until what's left converts to heat instead of escaping as reflected light.

That's why a Vantablack-coated object doesn't read as a black object. It reads as a hole. Depth and shape both depend on light bouncing off a surface at different angles, and Vantablack refuses to bounce any of it back. Coat a crumpled sheet of foil in it and the wrinkles disappear from view. You're left looking at something closer to an absence than a color.

One artist, one deal, nobody else invited

Kapoor had been experimenting with Vantablack since Surrey NanoSystems released it, and in 2016 he struck a deal for exclusive rights to use it as an artistic material. He used it sparingly himself, in sculptures like "Gathering Clouds," partly because applying it requires vapor deposition equipment rather than a paintbrush, and remains expensive and difficult on complex, three-dimensional shapes.

Surrey NanoSystems has defended the arrangement by pointing to that same difficulty. Getting the aesthetic effect right takes specialist training, and rather than build a program open to any interested artist, the company trained only Kapoor's studio. Kapoor himself framed it as a working relationship rather than a lockout: "Why exclusive? Because it's a collaboration, because I am wanting to push them to a certain use for it."

That's a narrower claim than the one that went viral. Most of the outrage that followed assumed Kapoor had locked other artists out of a pigment they could otherwise buy off a shelf. He hadn't, because that shelf never existed. What he'd actually secured was the only artistic-use training relationship the company was offering, for a material nobody else could purchase anyway.

"It isn't right that it belongs to one man"

The nuance didn't slow the backlash down. British painter Christian Furr spoke for a large chunk of the art world when he said, "I've never heard of an artist monopolizing a material. We should be able to use it. It isn't right that it belongs to one man." To Furr and plenty of others, Kapoor looked like he'd cornered a natural resource that should have belonged to everyone, whether or not they could have gotten hold of it before his deal existed.

The pinkest pink, and the middle finger that broke the internet

Stuart Semple answered with a stunt built entirely around spite. Later in 2016 he released what he called the world's pinkest pink, a raw, aggressively saturated pigment sold to anyone in the world, with one exception. The checkout page carried a disclaimer confirming the buyer was "not Anish Kapoor," was not affiliated with Anish Kapoor, and was not purchasing it on his behalf.

Kapoor got hold of a jar anyway, through an intermediary. He dipped his middle finger in the pink and posted the photo to Instagram. It's the single image most people associate with this entire feud: a wordless "try and stop me" aimed at an artist who had spent months publicly needling him. Semple didn't let it drop.

Black 2.0, Black 3.0, and a business built on spite

In early 2017, Semple released Black 2.0, a matte acrylic paint that mimicked Vantablack's light-swallowing effect closely enough to use with an ordinary brush, no vapor deposition chamber required. By 2019 he'd pushed further with Black 3.0, an even darker formula selling for £21.99 a tube. Both were, of course, available to everyone except Kapoor.

The joke turned into an actual product line. Semple's company, Culture Hustle, went on to sell "Diamond Dust," billed as the world's most glittery glitter, and a mirror-finish chrome paint, each carrying the same exclusion clause. What started as a single act of protest became a catalog, and arguably the more practical black paint most people who wanted "the blackest black" for an actual project ended up buying, since it doesn't require a lab.

The version Kapoor never controlled

Even the "Kapoor owns black" headline carried an asterisk most retellings dropped. His deal covered the original vapor-deposited Vantablack, the version grown in a specialized chamber for fine art and precision optics. It never covered VBx2, a sprayable formula Surrey NanoSystems developed later for architectural and industrial use, sold in 25-liter and 200-liter drums to contractors who complete the company's own training program. VBx2 reflects about 1% of light rather than the original coating's 0.035%, still "super black" by any normal measure, just not the exact material tied up in Kapoor's contract.

BMW put that gap to work in September 2019, spraying an X6 in VBx2 and calling it the world's first vehicle finished in Vantablack. It debuted at the Frankfurt Motor Show, a car so black it read as a flat cutout under the show lights rather than a three-dimensional object. Kapoor's exclusivity had never applied to it.

MIT accidentally made something blacker, then hid a $2 million diamond in it

The strangest chapter came from a lab that wasn't trying to make art at all. In 2019, engineers at MIT led by Brian Wardle were experimenting with growing carbon nanotubes on chlorine-etched aluminum foil to improve its electrical and thermal properties. They ended up with a material that absorbs at least 99.995% of incoming light, roughly ten times more effectively than Vantablack, and holds that number even across bumps and ridges where most ultra-black coatings lose their grip.

MIT's artist-in-residence, Diemut Strebe, saw an opening Kapoor's exclusivity deal had practically written for her. She coated a 16.78-carat natural yellow diamond, valued at $2 million, in the new material for a piece called "The Redemption of Vanity." It went on display at the New York Stock Exchange from September 13 to November 25, 2019: a diamond, the most literal symbol of exclusive value most people can name, rendered as a flat black void inside the building most associated with the idea that value is something you can own. Kapoor was never named in the piece's framing. He didn't need to be.

Can anyone actually own a color?

Strip away the finger-dipping and the checkout disclaimers, and the Vantablack feud is really a question about what exclusivity means when the thing in question isn't a patent or a painting, but a color. Legally, nobody can copyright black. What Kapoor bought was access to a manufacturing process and a training relationship with the one company that made a specific coating, not the color black as a concept. That's a real distinction, even if it didn't feel like one to the artists who spent 2016 watching him get something they couldn't.

There's one more wrinkle worth sitting with, and you're running into it right now. No screen can show you real Vantablack. A monitor works by emitting light, and Vantablack's entire function is refusing to reflect any. The darkest pixel your display can produce comes nowhere close to absorbing 99.965% of the light hitting it the way the coating does in person. A printed page fails for the same reason. Whatever image sits near this paragraph, however dark, is not the color it's describing.

That's the truest demonstration of the whole argument. You can spend years fighting over who gets to own a color, build a rival paint line out of spite, and get out-blacked by a university lab that wasn't even trying, and still not be able to show anyone what you won.