Pinkest Pink

We were thrilled to be given this perfectly pink pigment by a former member of the Institute of Making. This eye-wateringly fluorescent powder was developed by the artist Stuart Semple as a tongue-in-cheek response to Anish Kapoor’s controversial purchase of the exclusive artistic rights to use VantaBlack.

Vantablack is just one of a range of super black carbon nanotube-based materials that were first developed in around 2007 with aerospace and optical engineers in mind (another of which is the Super Black we have in our collection). These pigments were particularly useful in spacecraft instruments where they could be used to coat the instruments themselves, supressing any reflected and stray background light that might interfere with faint visible and invisible light signals they wanted to capture from distant astronomical objects. These ultra-black pigments later caught the attention of artists and car manufacturers alike because of the visual effects they produce: rendering any object coated in them completely visually flat, like a black hole. When Kapoor bought the exclusive rights to Vantablack in 2016, it held the title of the world’s blackest black. However it has since been overtaken by MIT’s blackest black, and is rivalled by Semple’s slightly less black but much cheaper and more accessible Black 3.0.

This is not the first time that pigments have been patented, trademarked or restricted in some way, but Kapoor’s monopoly of this particular superlative pigment garnered a strong reaction from the art community. Semple’s production of this pinkest pink was part of a performance aimed at ‘liberating colours’ from those who try to own them, and has since led to a number of other humorously-named materials such as the ‘most glittery glitter’ and the ‘mirroriest mirror paint’, all on sale to anyone except Kapoor.