Should an artist be able to claim the exclusive right to a material?
Anish Kapor: Has an exclusive license with vantablack.
Should you be able to own the rights to a material used in art?
Stuart Semple: Wants others to be able to create and experiment with this new material.
We live in one of the most successful capitalist economies known today. Since the invention of the internet in the 1980s the world economy continues to rapidly grow. Vendors are able to reach millions of customers in just one click. This revelation in the way we do business and the way we purchase things has spurred magnitudes of innovation through competition, in the technology, fashion, food, entertainment and art industries. But I want to talk about a flaw in the latter of those. The online art industry. With tons of competition and repetition from internet users, an artist by the name of Anish Kapoor purchased exclusive rights to a remarkable new material, sparking outrage in the art community and beyond. And rightly so because no artist should not be able to claim the exclusive rights to a material used in a creative work.
Art has a huge online presence, from fashion, sculpting, painting and drawing. There are top models modeling the latest off-white drop, to tattoo artists, to moms showing off their daughters' latest scribble, to hobbyists painters and drawing professionals. It doesn't matter who you are or what you create, we are innately proud of our creations and want the attention we believe we deserve for them. So everyone feels the need to share what they've created with the world. This is both a really cool thing because it creates community, and a really bad thing because it drowns out the sound of artistic genius with happenstance or inability this is particularly bad for people whose income depend on getting attention for their art. To combat this, people strive to be different and to be unique sometimes to the extreme. Some examples of extremity include, people painting with pigs blood, sculpting with fish skeletons or in Andy Warhol's case urinating on a copper sheet to create weird and “natural” erosion lines and splatter. But despite being borderline putrid these materials are common and very of “earth”. And it's not surprising artists go to great or putrid length to use different materials because art materials haven't changed in centuries. Debatably until recently in 2014, when a company called NanoSystems released a revolutionary technology called Vantablack. A truly astounding material that will surely revolutionize all industrial and scientific industries. Vantablack is composed of nano carbon tubes which capture 99.965% of light giving the appearance of nothingness. It was unlike anything we’ve seen before it was the blackest black. It was otherworldly. And It was designed to be specifically applied to aircraft and telescopes, but renowned artist Anish Kapoor had other ideas. He said he had a connection with the material and believed if anyone should get to use it, it was him and with his large pool of resources behind him there wasn't much stopping him. While it's not for certain it is said that Anish Kapoor paid a great deal to gain exclusive rights to this illusive material. But needless to say this was found unjust by the art community and outrage ensued. An artist by the name of Stuart Semple decided to fight back and make vantablack available to everyone, but to no avail. This event led to much controversy, not just about Kapoor having the exclusive rights to use vantablack, but people were mad about someone legally copyrighting a pigment in essence. This wasn't the first case ever in which someone legally claimed a pigment. In the mid 1960s French artist Yves Klein invented and patented a striking metallic blue pigment. There was little to no backlash for his patent because he did technically invent it - According to dirty art magazine. Kapoor on the other hand claimed the rights to a material which he did not invent. Especially when considering the exciting and boundless possibilities artists around the world could have created and shared this one's a doozy. No one should be able to claim the rights to an artistic material, it should be available to the masses to do and create what they want. Art as an entity is largely composed of visual effects which use different mediums all of which provide a specific effect, and new materials such as vanta black should be considered one of the same. Especially when considering the pre existing hype and excitement for the material it is not fair that one man gets exclusive access.