Chromophobia & Monochrome Art Beef
Track 07 // Vol. 02: PINK
This week started off with an rad surprise. The Drip got featured on Substack’s homepage and app, so if you’re a new subscriber, thank you and welcome!
Last week, I wrote about the cultural impact of Cam’ron’s Killa Pink, and unpacked a little history on why we, in the West, associate pink as feminine. (Read it here for more context.) For this week’s post, I want us to keep digging into our biases and associations with color. Let’s get a little philosophical while we’re at it.
Track 07 is about chromophobia. Colors reflect our internalized fears. The prism is a prison. Taste the rainbow.
Radio Edit:
It’s not just pink that provokes feminine associations—colorful things in general often yield similar judgements. In the West, loud colors often get coded as childish, cheap, gauche, and garish. Restraint in color conveys maturity, money, taste, and class. Why do we perceive color like this? It begins with the idea of chromophobia, the fear of corruption or ruination through color.
Extended Play:
In his book Chromophobia, David Batchelor chronicles philosophies on color from Socrates to Kant to Le Corbusier, through its treatment in art, theory, literature, architecture, and cinema. He threads a through-line in the fear of and need to control color with sexist and racist values that promote a certain kind of white/European cultural and aesthetic dominance.
In his words:
”Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other, it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both.”
Chomophobia forces an aesthetic repression in our judgements and our choices in daily life. For example, I experience chromophobia when I try to dress professionally, overriding the fact that my style icon is and will always be Ms. Frizzle from the Magic School Bus.
How have you encountered chromophobia in your own life?
A familiar trope in books and movies sets scenes that evolve from colorless worlds to colorful ones—but at a cost. The Giver by Lois Lowry made a lasting impression on me as a kid in this way. In this book, a dystopian society called the Community, is stripped of color and memory in order for authorities to preserve order and maintain control. The Giver and the Receiver of Memory are the only people who can experience color, retain knowledge of history, and absorb feelings. Spoiler alert: the Receiver of Memory, a young boy named Jonas, ultimately rebels by sharing memories with another human, suffers for it, and meets an ambiguous end.
In the 1998 film Pleasantville, an ‘idyllic’ community filmed as a black-and-white 1950s sitcom, gradually turns technicolor when its residents engage with new ideas in books, sex, and emotions. It causes mad tension between those who crave change and those who strive to preserve the small town status quo. Did color contaminate a spotless mind and a perfect place, or improve them? Yes and yes. It feels weird to consider enhancement as a consequence of mess and corruption, and perhaps therein lies the tension.
In 2017, I went to a museum exhibit at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco called Gods of Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World. It recreated replicas of ancient sculptures and architecture in their original form: painted in bright colors and patterns.
According to the exhibit notes:
“When antiquities were rediscovered after prolonged exposure to the elements, their colored surfaces had often faded to invisibility. As a result, later sculptors such as Michelangelo who were inspired by Greek and Roman sculpture left their own marble and bronze surfaces unadorned, perpetuating this inaccurate classical ideal. Gods in Color emphasizes how ancient sculpture is incomplete without color. White or monochrome sculpture would have been as strange to the ancients as the color reconstructions might seem to us.”
Looking back, this exhibit expanded my understanding of how deeply and broadly chromophobia gets rooted into our perspective. As I walked around the galleries, everything looked wrong. Garish color combinations tainted the white marble that emphasized the beautiful forms of bodies and golden ratios in architecture. The Parthenon was not a pristine, glistening shrine, but rather, an Easter egg. While I appreciate it now, I had to deprogram my monochrome expectations to embrace the look of ancient polychromy.
Studying art is, in a way, chasing an ideal. Michelangelo chased the flawless forms of Greek and Roman antiquities and thus created the archetype which we still uphold today. It wasn’t the color necessarily that challenged me in this exhibit, but the idea that the ideal is subjective and misunderstood. We crown something as ideal when we collectively decide our own values; we make it a tyrant when we don’t question them over time.
Now, I want to kick it back to Cam’ron and his Pantone patent for Killa Pink. I’m very interested in the philosophical implications of trademarking and patenting colors. I wonder if doing so is also a form of chromophobia, in that there is a need to control, to own, and even to subvert color. In Chromophobia, Batchelor writes about French critic and color theorist Charles Blanc’s (C’mon nominative determinism!) belief that “color could not be ignored or dismissed, but rather, contained and subordinated—like a woman.” Barf. You can certainly control color in the way you curate your space and fashion choices, but how can you truly own a color?
Before Cam’ron’s branded Killa Pink, there was Yves Klein’s trademark blue. Yves Klein was a Post-War European artist who developed and trademarked his own blue called International Klein Blue in the 1950s. He worked exclusively in this blue monochrome for years to the point where it became synonymous with his artistic identity. In the 1960s, Klein patented the chemical process to create IKB that he developed in collaboration with art supplier Edouard Adam in Paris.
These pictures don’t even do it justice. There is something so electric and unforgettable about International Klein Blue when you see it in real life. Everything else looks dull and analog against the almost HD saturation of this color. His most enduring art legacy is the color itself; he owns it by name and a deep association. Artists and designers who use Yves Klein’s blue effectively get absorbed into his mythology and into the continuum of his influence.
Within the intersection of art and science, in 2014 Surrey Nanosystems created Vantablack, a material that can absorb 99.965% of visible light. Known then as ‘the blackest black,’ it was created for engineering applications, an example being the light absorption needs for telescopes. Anish Kapoor, the sculptor known for “The Bean” aka Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park, saw its potential and bought its exclusive rights to use it for art in 2016.
This stirred controversy in the art world, raising questions about accessibility. In cheeky retaliation, artist Stuart Semple, created the “World’s Pinkest Pink,” and started an enduring, all-monochrome art beef with Kapoor.
Every paint he sells on his website also comes with this legal accompaniment:
In April 2022, Anish Kapoor finally unveiled his Vantablack sculptures at two solo shows during the 59th Venice Biennale, after years of mystery, notoriety, and speculation. In this Wallpaper article, Kapoor tries to set the record straight: “There’s been this ridiculous controversy about me having control over the color. It’s perfectly straightforward: it’s not a color. It’s a technology. And it’s extremely complicated and sophisticated.”
Previously, Kapoor responded to this criticism with this very subtle Instagram post in 2016. I guess he figured out a way to get his hands on/in it!
This good ol’ petty art beef raised the stakes for others to enter the ring. Along with the World’s Pinkest Pink, Semple created Black 2.0, and then Black 3.0 which he claims to be the blackest black paint, absorbing 99% of light. Not to be outdone, a company called Koyo Orient Japan developed Musou Black, a paint that beats Black 3.0 by absorbing 99.4% of light. (If you want to see a dude paint his entire room with it, here’s the video.). In 2019, MIT created a material that could absorb 99.995% of visible light, which is now considered somewhat definitively as the blackest black…?
According to this MIT article:
“The material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes, or CNTs — microscopic filaments of carbon, like a fuzzy forest of tiny trees, that the team grew on a surface of chlorine-etched aluminum foil. The foil captures at least 99.995 percent* of any incoming light, making it the blackest material on record.”
The effects of these intense light-absorbing materials appear mesmerizing. They have the optical ability to flatten 3D objects, devouring light and space. According to Kapoor, Vantablack is “blacker than a black hole.” At this point, the percentage of light absorption is negligible before it becomes a conceptual argument. What does it mean to own the blackest black? To own the blackest black is to create a void so undeniable that it collapses and consumes dimension. What does it mean to own the pinkest pink? In this case, it’s a meta-rebuttal against the absurdity of ownership. While the controversy of owning Vantablack pushed other artists and scientists to develop more accessible solutions, this feels like a negative space race.
At face value, Stuart Semple’s stance is amusing marketing, if not a little overboard. I appreciate and support the call to create more accessibility in art, but in a recent email exchange about this, my friend Alexandra hit me with some interesting questions to consider:
It seems to be acceptable to trademark pattern and design; why not color, if one has spent labor in producing it?
Does it matter whether it's an academic in a lab at MIT, or an artist in a private studio?
Why is it more unacceptable for an artist to have purchased the rights to use this material than for Surrey Nanosystems to have sold it?
Are artists obliged to make their work available for public consumption in a way that scientists aren't? —Alexandra Kelly, quoted with permission
Straightaway, the labor argument knocked me over. We love art and people spend a lot of money on it, but truthfully, creative work is always devalued! We expect unfettered accessibility to materials and free content. The artistic vs. scientific intellectual property debate also struck me. If Vantablack’s exclusive rights were sold to build only one kind of telescope, no one would bat an eye! It made me think about the arguments for patent waivers on COVID vaccines in order to make them equally distributable to all countries, as outlined in this 2021 Nature article. In the desire to create value through control and ownership, where do we draw the lines in equity and access in art and science?
Thanks for reading.
psst…look out for a hidden track soon…
wooo The Giver and Pleasantville in one post intro...throwback city!