Vantablack: The Blackest Material and the Art Feud It Ignited

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Coat a crumpled sheet of aluminum foil in Vantablack and the ridges disappear. What remains looks like a flat hole cut out of the world. Unveiled in July 2014 by Surrey NanoSystems, the UK company founded by Ben Jensen, the original material is a forest of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes that absorbs up to 99.965 percent of visible light. Photons enter the gaps between the tubes, ricochet until they are spent, and leave as a trace of heat.

This episode covers the physics, the purpose, and the fight. Vantablack was made for aerospace work: lining telescope baffles so stray light cannot wash out faint images, and possibly darkening satellites that streak across observatory photos. Then the company granted artist Anish Kapoor an exclusive license for artistic use, and the art world erupted. Rival paints followed, as did sprayable versions that carried the void to the Olympics, the Met Gala, and a BMW.

• NASA had made a similar super black coating earlier, but it had to be grown at 750 degrees Celsius. Surrey NanoSystems cut that to 400, low enough to coat practical aerospace parts.
• In 2019 engineers at MIT produced a material that reflects a tenth as much light, yet Vantablack kept its commercial edge through durability, vibration resistance, and low particle fallout.
• Boston artist Jason Chase and Massachusetts manufacturer NanoLab answered the Kapoor monopoly with a rival nanotube paint named Singularity Black, meant to open super black to every artist.
• The irony of the feud: original Vantablack is grown in a chamber, not painted, and falls under UK export controls. A canvas would have burned long before it was coated.
• The later VBX2 spray, which contains no nanotubes, covered a pavilion at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, a Call of Duty Black Ops house in London, and a BMW X6 concept shown in Frankfurt in 2019.