A material so dark it turns crumpled foil into a featureless void — absorbing 99.965% of light — became the center of the art world's pettiest feud when sculptor Anish Kapoor bought the exclusive rights to it. What followed was a decade of revenge: the Pinkest Pink, a paint everyone on Earth could buy except Kapoor, and an escalating race to engineer the darkest thing in the universe. Nature, it turns out, got there first.
SciShow's clear breakdown of how a forest of carbon nanotubes traps 99.965% of visible light, turning crumpled foil into a featureless void. The best place to grasp that 'black' here is about structure, not pigment.
The canonical reference on the material: how the nanotubes are grown, the 99.965% absorption figure, and the documented backlash over Kapoor's exclusive artistic license.
A punchy one-minute doc on Stuart Semple's crusade to democratize ultra-black paint after Kapoor locked up Vantablack. The perfect hook that sets up the whole feud.
The definitive narrative of the feud, from Kapoor's 2016 monopoly and one artist's 'dynamite in the art world' quote to Pinkest Pink, Black 2.0, and the eventual MIT one-upmanship. The single best read to understand the whole saga.
Straight from Semple's own channel: the artist legally adopts the name 'Anish Kapoor' to weasel around the exclusivity clause and finally buy the forbidden material. The pettiest, most delightful escalation in the grudge.
A video-essay retelling of the Pinkest Pink vs. Vantablack showdown — including Kapoor's infamous middle-finger-dipped-in-pink Instagram post. Captures why the art world took sides.
The science that trumped everyone: an accidentally-discovered nanotube coating absorbing 99.995% of light, unveiled by making a $2 million diamond vanish into a void at the NYSE. MIT pointedly released it for any artist to use.
Nature got there first: deep-sea fish evolved melanin nanostructures that swallow up to 99.9% of light, working 'like a pinball machine' for photons. Birds of paradise and abyssal fish were the original ultra-black engineers.