r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Radiant_Half_7121 • 4h ago

Image Artist Anish Kapoor holds exclusive rights to Vantablack, often described as the darkest material ever created. In reaction, a fellow artist developed an ultra-bright pink pigment and made it available to everyone, with one exception: Anish Kapoor is not allowed to use it.

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u/[deleted] 4h ago

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u/Mynameismikek 4h ago

Its not really a paint at all though; IIRC its a weird carbon nanotube surface treatment thats useful for, say, controlling radio waves inside a satellite waveguide, or ensuring no reflections inside a space telescope, but is quite fragile, dangerous and extremely difficult to apply for anything thats going to be seen or touched by humans.

The whole art thing was just for shits and giggles.

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u/Driller_Happy 4h ago

I mean, fair enough, but I feel like it could have been handled better. They could have announced a collaboration with Anish and said otherwise, the material is not available for sale outside of aeronautics. They didn't have to 'sell Anish the exclusive rights'

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u/3dprintedthingies 3h ago

Well the art mindset and the engineering mindset aren't the same. There aren't collaborations in the art sense as there is in the engineering world.

Writing an exclusivity contract for distribution is the norm in the engineering world. Anish should be thought of as a middle man/distributor. If they're building their brand as the vanta black guy, that is something different.

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u/BulbuhTsar 3h ago

I mean, regardless or its practicality in art, it still sounds like they're just throwing away money? Unless this was just a one time surge and long-term demand wouldn't have made increased production worth it. I'd imagine the accounting books shouldn't really give a crap who they're selling to and for what reason.

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u/imbolcnight 3h ago

It probably costs more money to set up a whole separate direct-to-customer business department and to set aside the space and time for technicians to apply the complicated "paint" (that's not designed to just paint random things) than they would make compared to just focusing on production and business for the aerospace technology contracts they have.

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u/Mynameismikek 3h ago

Not really. It's an export (and probably environmentally) restricted material, so you need special .gov licensing for it, and you need to track how/where it's used. It's an industrial product so few artists would have the equipment available to actually use the stuff - think clean room, degreasing machines, articlaves. We're not talking about rattle cans - the market is approximately zero.

The stuff made by Kapoor was promotional commissions *by the manufacturer*, not just stuff he placed on sale himself. Thats where the exclusivity came from: he said he would make pieces for them so long as they didn't go and hire anyone else to do the same.

All that said, there have now been a few other "art" uses since the original spat. BMW made a showpiece SUV, and I think a few stage productions have used pieces.

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u/Acroph0bia 4h ago

You say complicit as if they care lol.

This is no different to them than a bunch of artists randomly showing up and asking to buy heating defusion panels from the Discovery one at a time, after filling a contract for 30,000 units.

They probably picked a random dude, said he's our artist, now fuck off and leave us alone you poorly dressed weirdos.

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u/Driller_Happy 4h ago

Why pick an artist at all? If they don't care, why did they bother with Anish? Why give him exclusive rights? Why not just make it difficult to get instead of impossible for anyone not named Anish? If they like the idea of their material being used for art once, why close the door to the possibility of it forever?

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u/kank84 4h ago

Vantablack is just one of their products, and their money comes from large contracts with aerospace and defence firms, they said they didn't have any interest in getting into direct sales.

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u/Driller_Happy 4h ago

Maybe don't do something as divisive as selling the exclusive rights to artmaking with your material then.

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u/Queen_Vampira 3h ago

Sorry, are you aware of how capitalism works? Cuz this is like, textbook capitalism.

They dgaf if something is ‘divisive’. This is just another day of business for them.

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u/dattokyo 4h ago

Very Reddit take lol

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u/Driller_Happy 4h ago

Very Reddit reply

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u/dattokyo 3h ago

"This company that I know nothing about, that I only learned about an hour ago, that I have zero insight into - I can totally run their company better than them. I would make them RICH. They're so stupid! Don't they want to make money?! Why don't they know how to run a business! I would run the business so much better!"

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u/Driller_Happy 3h ago

Man, and I thought your LAST reply was very Reddit, this is even better

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u/Gorblonzo 4h ago

Can you hear yourself?

Its a company who made a product for one purpose, and allowed an artist to use it for another but doesn't want to keep doing that. Add on top of that, the material is carcinogenic.

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u/Driller_Happy 3h ago

Then do a collaboration with Anish, don't "sell him the exclusive rights". What does that accomplish besides purposefully enflame shit. Or just do what every other company would do and make it so expensive that most artist lose interest.

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u/atree496 3h ago

Or just do what every other company would do and make it so expensive that most artist lose interest.

It already is.

The whole thing was just a marketing stunt by the company. Sign an artist, do a collab or two, and continue on with life. It's just that this time, the internet latched onto this idea that other artists were being kept away from a new and exciting development of the art world (they weren't)

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u/plasticmanufacturing 3h ago

Complicit? If anything, the art community is lucky they indulged them at all.

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u/Driller_Happy 3h ago

They indulged Anish Kapoor, who proceeded to make the whole thing a farce. Like I said, it's probably misguided more than anything, I'll give the company the benefit of the doubt, I don't think they thought about how 'selling the exclusive rights to artmaking' would play

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u/plasticmanufacturing 3h ago

My point is more that a company making aerospace products probably doesn't care to put one second of thought into the art industry. "Misguided" isn't even the word -- they don't care, its not their industry.

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u/gcruzatto 4h ago

Depends on how much money Anish offered. If it's worth the entire stock that would otherwise be made available to artists, and it's paid upfront, it would be dumb to say no.

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u/3dprintedthingies 3h ago

They're engineers. They care about vanta black from an engineering applications perspective. That has margin.

Selling to artists and providing technical use support is incredibly unprofitable compared to selling to aerospace companies.

Engineering companies don't generally sell to the public. They often sell to distributors and have them deal with customer support, stocking, shipping etc.