Here's an idea.
You can trademark a color, but it's a weird thing to do
and people might get mad.
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This episode is brought to you by Hover.
In 2014, Surrey Nanosystems, a British nanotechnology firm,
invented a new pigment called Vantablack,
which was at the time the darkest substance known to man,
capturing 99.96% of light which hit it.
I've never seen it in person, but on camera at least,
objects coated in Vantablack appear flat and empty
like they're a hole cut into space itself,
revealing the infinite void hiding within every object.
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Unlike normal pigments, which are often
a particulate matter that's mixed with water or oil
to make paint, Vantablack is grown.
It's made up of carbon nanotubes, a microscopic forest
comprised of chain-link-looking shapes 10,000 times smaller
than a human hair.
And that traps all of that light,
creating that unreal blankness.
Last year, Surrey Nanosystems developed a spray paint version
for small objects, and as of a few months ago,
they announced Vantablack 2.0, which
is so dark their spectrometers can't even
measure how much light it's not reflecting.
How much more black could this be?
And the answer is [GUITAR RIFF]
All of which is very cool.
Cool enough that it's newsworthy.
Vantablack has all kinds of applications-- managing
light inside and around telescopes
and other astronomical equipment,
inside infrared instruments, coating
for the hands of this $95,000 watch,
and a few applications in circuit design
that I just barely understand.
But those things aren't what made news--
not at first, at least.
What first made news was this guy.
This is Sir Anish Kapoor.
He's a British artist, most well-known
in the US for the Cloud Gate in Chicago.
He also just unveiled a new piece in Brooklyn
called Descension.
And he is the exclusive licensee able to use Vantablack in art.
This has made some people very upset.
Kapoor is, by most accounts, a great artist.
I like his work a lot.
His Marsyas at the Tate Modern was insane.
I recently saw Eyes Turned Inward at the Museu Berardo
in Lisbon.
It's really awesome.
It has some crazy acoustic properties.
But is he so good that he should have exclusive access
to a brand new shade of black?
To Surrey Nanotech, the arrangement
works because Vantablack is hard to apply correctly and safely.
It's hard to make, so they don't have a lot of it.
So if anyone's going to use it to make art,
it might as well be a world-famous sculptor
who has demonstrated great skill with color.
And to hear Kapoor talk about the situation,
it makes sense because it's almost like a collaboration.
Almost like Vantablack itself is a work of art which
he is helping Surrey realize.
But some folks in the art world, they
see red when they see Kapoor's name next to Vantablack.
British portraitist, Christian [INAUDIBLE],, says nuh-uh.
He says that allowing only one person to use this new shade
holds the art world back.
He told the Daily Mail that it isn't right
that it belongs to one man.
Belgian artist, Frederik De Wilde told Quartz,
"Personally, I find this type of monopoly
rather absurd and stifling."
Stewart Simple, an artist and pigmentor?
Pimenteer?
Pigment maven?
He was so miffed that he took the bender
bending Rodriguez route and made his own version of Vantablack.
I assume without nanotubes, though.
I don't know for sure.
It's called Black 2.0 and we bought some.
When buying this, I actually had to promise
that I'm not Anish Kapoor or an employee of his
and that I'm not planning on selling this to Anish
Kapoor or an employee of his.
Stewart applied the same restrictions
to his Ultra Sparkly Glitter and also his Pinkest Pink,
which we also got.
Though, by the look of Sir Kapoor's Instagram,
the terms are less enforceable than ideal.
In the comments of this photo, you'll
also see tons of people posting with the hashtag,
#ShareTheBlack, which, OK, gets us finally
to the first big set of questions.
Is this a thing you can do?
Can you stop people from using a color?
Or maybe more controversially, should you try?
And even if you can and you should,
why is it that people seem to take this sort of thing
so seriously?
So there's a pretty long history of protecting colors.
And by pretty long, I mean just under 60 years.
A big first happened in the art world, too.
While there have long been artists
whose work is associated with colors or combinations
of colors, it wasn't until the mid-20th century
French artist Yves Klein worked with paint supplier
Edward [INAUDIBLE] to develop International Klein
Blue, or IKB, that a specific shade became so strongly
twinned with a single artist.
Klein made a bunch of works using IKB--
from paintings to sculptures to lots
of stuff sort of in between, IKB became Klein's trademark color,
but he never actually trademarked it or patented it.
It's often reported that he did, but he only
ever submitted a soleau envelope for the method of its creation.
In France, a soleau envelope is a kind of record of invention
which might precede a patent application
but isn't the same as one.
What Klein did patent is a method
he used to create many IKB paintings.
Specifically, viewing the entire composition from afar
because the paint is actually applied by naked models.
It was the '60s.
So IKB is often used as a precedent
for an artist with exclusive rights to a color
but it's a bit of a false one.
I mean, other artists use it, including
Kapoor and the Blue Man Group.
There are, however, plenty of businesses
who have trademarked colors.
And just as a brief aside, a trademark
is a form of intellectual property
that defends symbols or words associated
with a company or organization.
The Nike swoosh, the PBS P head, the AT&T death star-- those
are all trademarks.
Marks of their trade which identify them
with all of the stuff associated with their brand,
and so they are protected by IP law.
But it turns out, in certain situations,
a color can act as a mark and be protected like one too--
as long as the color is strongly associated
with a specific product and that color isn't functional.
These are called color marks, and legal precedent
for them in the US was set in 1985
when Owens Corning got the pink color associated
with their insulation protected.
Tiffany blue is protected on boxes and bags.
Louis Vuitton red is protected on the soles of shoes.
T-Mobile magenta is protected amongst telcos.
UPS brown for shipping companies.
And wiffle yellow for plastic bats.
Cadbury purple is not protected, though.
Courts said that they were too broad in their request.
They wanted to protect Pantone 2685C in an excess of uses
and situations.
John Deere green isn't protected either
because it has an aesthetic function.
Lots of farm equipment comes in green
and people like to buy matching stuff,
so if John Deere was the only company allowed
to make matching gear, they'd have an unfair advantage.
One company also tried to trademark black boat motors
and were prevented because a black coating makes
motors look smaller, which boating enthusiasts--
MAN: (SINGING) Sailing.
--prefer.
Aesthetic function.
But OK, granted, this is different
from a nanotech company granting exclusive license
of a color that's difficult and even dangerous
to produce and apply to a single world-famous artist
for artworks.
But the colormark laws might provide some insight
into our other questions.
Should colors be protected?
And if they are, why might people flip out #ShareTheBlack?
Colormarks are awarded based upon a strict association that
has built up over a long period where protection
isn't originally provided.
I couldn't start Micronet Industries tomorrow
and be awarded a colormark for fluorescent orange light bulbs
because no widespread recognition between light bulbs
and fluorescent orange exists.
I'd have to work my way there and it would probably
take a while.
So this is one Kapoor-exclusive license counterargument.
Artists and audiences are being asked
to develop an association between Anish
and this incredible shade of black
before it has had time to develop.
One reasonable fear, especially in the art world,
is that the association will stick.
For how long might all extreme blacks
mentally conjure Kapoor and his work,
even as other methods for their distribution arise?
American painter and sculptor Donald Judd
wrote that "color, like material,
is what art is made from," explaining
that no association a color possesses is so strong
it can't ever be challenged, but that color--
every color-- nonetheless possesses meaning.
This gets us to the second big point.
Color has meaning.
But not, like, a clear one.
Part of that has to do with how the perception of color
itself is mysterious.
Renowned artist and color theorist Josef Albers
put it this way when writing about the color red
versus the word red.
"When we consider further associations and reactions
which are experienced in connection
with the color and the name, probably everyone
will diverge again in many different directions."
We may each think of something reasonably red-like
when we hear the word, but each mental red
is probably different.
Likewise, we may look at the same red shade,
but it's associations--
a high school football jersey, our favorite lipstick shade,
a Coca-Cola label--
will differ person to person.
Which is to say color is very personal.
The experience of it is deeply subjective.
So fundamentally so that the question about what color even
is has caused disagreement between scientists,
psychologists, and philosophers for ages.
Do things have color or do we perceive facets of things which
our brains interpret as color?
Is there such a thing as pure color,
freed from shape, texture or experience?
It's within color's very nature to belong in some way
to the people who experience it.
This provides one explanation of why colormarks
are so weird and fascinating, which I think they are,
and I'd guess that people agree.
If it's inspired a dozen listicles,
it's probably at least mildly fascinating, right?
Colormarks are a way of saying that a company gets
to have a color--
a thing which is at once unhaveable--
and had in its own special way by everyone who sees it.
And it also provides an explanation
of #ShareTheBlack and the ire around the idea of a shade
being so tightly controlled.
The shade is already shared in that we've experienced it,
but also never shared in that we can't use it.
Unlike a colormark, an association
has been created but access is widely limited.
This fact conjures some already disappointing things
about the art world and its renown obsession
with economics, ownership, and scarcity.
De Wilde, to Quartz again, says, "Buying exclusivity of using
a color is rather ridiculous.
It's most likely an institutional reflex,
an expression of a fear, the desperate desire to own art,"
which is maybe melodramatic but speaks
to what's perhaps so upsetting about Vantablack's exclusivity.
It reinforces, or in one view, forces
a kind of ownership that seems at odds with the thing itself.
The question may come down to what Vantablack is.
Is it a color or a material?
And thus, deciding if Kapoor's exclusive right
to have some black goop is more or less
galling than his exclusive right to a whole new shade
of a color.
But it may also come down to what
we think of artists as being responsible for making.
Does Kapoor as an artist make objects
or does he make experiences?
And if he makes experiences, then maybe
there is something somehow wrong or simply dismaying
and an attempt to claim a monopoly on one.
What do y'all think?
Is it strange or dismaying that an artist
has exclusive license to this new shade of the color black
or is it totally dope and fine?
Let us know in the comments, and I'll respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
Thank you so much to everybody who came to VidCon
and who said hi.
Thanks to everyone who came to the PBS,
DS, D&D Q&A. Who came to the Nerd Night, who came to the
meet up.
It was great getting to see you.
Great getting to see everybody that we
get to hang out with at VidCon.
Great to hear what you're thinking about and working on.
It was, as always, a huge pleasure.
So yeah, just thank you, thank you, thank you.
In this week's comment response, we
talk about your thoughts regarding
Magic the Gathering and Jazz.
If you want to watch that one, you can find a link in the Do
We Do or wait for the end card to show up.
For next week's episode, we are going
to be doing a Q&A episode, which we
haven't done for a very long time,
so send me your questions.
Give them to us on Twitter, on Facebook, on the SubReddit,
and in the comments below.
I'm going to make a post on each of those,
including a stickied-- a pinned post-- a pinned comment below.
And yeah, let me know what you want to know about.
Ask me all kinds of questions.
Please also thumbs up or like other questions
that you see that you want answered.
I can't guarantee that that means I will answer them
but it certainly doesn't hurt.
We're going to be shooting that next Wednesday
so you have until Wednesday morning Eastern Time
to leave your questions or vote for what's already there.
We have a Facebook in IRC and a SubReddit-- links
to those in the Do We Do.
The tweets of the weeks come from,
first, Leif on the Wind, who points us
towards a Magic the Gathering bracket, where
an organization is attempting to figure out the best
Magic the Gathering card.
Which, I mean, if you go check it out,
you will see that it is quite the undertaking.
And also Tom Rivlin, who points us
towards an Ian Bogost piece for Atlantic about Binky,
the app that does nothing.
You see how it's, yeah.
It's good.
And hey, in case you were wondering,
this episode was brought to you by Hover,
which helps you buy and manage domain names.
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And last but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these sharers of the black.
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