Scandal sells, and many key figures in the art world never resent promoting themselves through polemic, especially not Anish Kapoor. For the British superstar sculptor, not a year goes by without its matching heated controversy. In 2015, Kapoor was highly criticized in France for Dirty Corner, the monumental steel trunk he displayed in the gardens of Versailles Castle. Not only did he dub it the “queen vagina”, much to the displeasure of the posh and easily-shocked French art critics, he also refused to clean up the anti-Semitic graffiti performed on it, explaining that he wished to conserve this testimony to blatant intolerance rather than erase it on the sly. That did not suit the municipal authorities of Versailles, who had him condemned for a so-called lack of cooperation. Last year, another provocative gesture made him come once again under the scrutiny of media, critics and fellow artists.
In February 2016, Kapoor publicly boasted that he had secured exclusive rights for the use of ‘Vantablack’, widely considered to be the darkest artificial substance ever made — since this alignment of carbon nanotubes is said to absorb more than 99.9% of radiation in the visible spectrum. The backlash among his fellow painters and sculptors was immediate and harsh. Whereas most of them used the press to deem Kapoor’s monopoly on a material utterly absurd, and kindly reminded him that true artists did not have to deprive their contemporaries to impose their art, British artist Stuart Semple decided to beat the sculptor at his own game. He created a pigment entitled “the world’s pinkest pink”, available for everyone “except Anish Kapoor”, which was legally forbidden to purchase it on Semple’s website. Unfortunately for Semple, some of his powder made its way to Kapoor’s hand. The sculptor did not resist the temptation to post on Instagram a picture of his middle finger dipped in the pink pigment that he wittily entitled “Up yours!”.
Beyond the childlike tone of the feud and the debatable relevance of Kapoor’s indelicate answer, which is vaguely reminiscent of the attitude of New York traders drinking champagne in front of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, the Vantablack argument interestingly encapsulates several major evolutions undertaken by art during the two last centuries.
Firstly, it demonstrates that, whereas fine arts were once mainly associated with drawing, they have tended to become more and more colour-centric. In a typical Renaissance studio, the master was only in charge of the layout while his assistants and his apprentices were charged to fill it with pigments, proving that colouring was considered as a secondary, even menial task. In the eighteenth century, Kant’s Critique of Judgement emphasized at length that art is related to lines and not to colours, since the latter are too versatile and dependent on subjective appreciation to play a significant role in the making of true and universal beauty. However, such an aesthetic stance was then seriously qualified by the rise of abstract art.
In the twentieth century, several leading painters decided to prove that colour was self-sufficient to create an artwork. In that respect, the French painter Yves Klein might be considered one of the artists who went even further. Obsessed by a certain tone of ultramarine blue that he defined as the shade of the sky above Nice, his Mediterranean hometown in the South of France, he devoted much of his artistic endeavours to devise his “International Klein Blue” (IKB). Once he managed to find the right formula, most of his paintings consisted of monochromes, that is to say canvases partially or completely covered in bright IKB, up to the point that the whole of Klein’s artistic identity can be rightly summed up by his iconic blue.
One of the consequences of that new importance of colour is a seemingly stronger emphasis on chromatic technology. Just as Kapoor’s Vantablack was partially conceived by physics researchers, Klein had to collaborate with Rhône-Poulenc, one of France’s biggest chemical companies, to develop his powerful blue pigment. In both cases, what is patented is therefore not the colour in itself but the sum of industrial devices and processes that enables the artist to produce a specific hue. If another visual artist managed to produce Klein’s blue without using his special mix of pigment and “Rhodopas M.” or the shade of Vantablack with another material, neither Kapoor nor Klein’s legal heirs would have the right to sue that artist. The fact that it is a technology and not a colour per se that is trademarked is rather good news for other artists, to the extent that there are several ways to artistically experiment with the power of colours without resorting to top-notch technologies. After all, Kapoor has not yet patented the right to paint in black, even if it can almost feel like it when you listen to his staunchest opponents.
Kapoor’s fascination with black is indeed widely shared among contemporary artists and some of them have already clearly demonstrated that it is possible to capture the intensity of blackness without Vantablack. It is with rather low-tech means that Pierre Soulages, arguably the most famous French painter alive, has been exploring since the early sixties what he dubs the realm of “outrenoir”, that is to say ultrablack. Unlike Kapoor, his chromatic quest does not aim at producing a specific black that would be “the” definitive black. Conversely, his series of almost-identical abstract paintings convey the idea that black is a true colour to the extent that it can suggest, as every other hue, several nuances. He adamantly defends that black can depict light as well as darkness, which is quite the opposite to Kapoor’s stance, mainly interested in the univocality of black.
Even if Kapoor’s monopoly on Vantablack will probably not impede the chromatic researches of others artists, his attitude still remains problematic because it proves how dominant a position he has secured in the art world. Because his works are immeasurably more valued than most of the art productions available on market, Kapoor can take the liberty to appropriate innovations for his sole use.
However, it would be fair to observe that Kapoor is not the only big name in the art industry to have a problem with appropriation. These past few years, no less rich and infamous artists Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have also been disparaged for their tendency to appropriate the creative work and researches of others.
For instance, thanks to his flourishing “firm”, Jeff Koons does not hesitate to bend in his favour the rules of copyrights and intellectual property. For his Banality sculptures and installations, he did not pay the rights for all the pictures that inspired some of his most famous pieces, and paying higher fees in the three ensuing legal battles did not turn out to be a problem for him when he had to do so in 2015. The removal of the incriminated sculptures from his big retrospective in Centre Pompidou (Paris) did not cause major outrage, nor diminish the value of his works.
In the same vein, when earlier this year Nigerian artists accused Damien Hirst of cultural appropriation because he had featured in his Venice Biennale show a golden replica of a fourteenth-century Yoruba sculpture, taken to the British Museum during the colonial period, their incriminations were poorly showcased in art magazines and general press, and the reviews emphasized rather that the exhibition was a smashing come-back and would surely result in substantial financial gains for Hirst.
When criticized for importing ruthless and capitalistic practices into the artistic world, Kapoor, Koons, Hirst and other contemporary art stars usually do not feel the need to defend themselves. Confident in their own creative genius and assured by their wealth and fame, it is easy for them to present their detractors as jealous, frustrated and less-talented counterparts, or to choose to remain silent and impervious to any form of criticism. Their haughtiness partially accounts for their success, and the power of fascination they exert upon art collectors and world audiences. Unfortunately, it also quashes an important debate: isn’t it time to implement minimal regulations in the highly speculative and almost crazy worldwide art market, where nowadays the winners take it all, and can even extend their power to art components as basic and necessary as colours?