Stuart Semple (legally known as Anish Kapoor) /Culture Hustle is a grifter/con artist and you all fell for it.
Seeing Anish Kapoor's installation with Greenpeace online led me down a rabbit hole regarding Stuart Semple and his company Culture Hustle
You may know Semple for the whole vantablack debacle with Anish Kapoor which that story has had a whole lot of misinformation. People have tackled that on here
But I here to milkshake duck Semple for you with his grifting in 2025. Semple is nothing more than a man who used outrage marketing posing himself as someone for small artist to get their money all while failing to ship orders to his actual customers, dabbling in NFTs and genAI and basically scamming people on Kickstarter
Stuart Semple misinforms people about color trademarks as an attack on creative expression and in order to "liberate" said colors, YOU have to buy his products. He got sued by Calvin Klein for copyright infringement for the Easy Klein. While I am for fair use in art and entertainment, he was selling goods which is a much.
His marketing strategies are either misinforming people about stuff like trademark law or the whole vantablack in order to paint as "a wittle guy looking out for smol artists UwU" is to commit try to copyright infringement , get shed so he can cry to press and get people to buy his products but not ship them. He's tried to redo this with Mattel (Barbie) and Hershey's (Reese's)
He tried to dabble in NFTs and was caught using genAI for his failed dumbphone indiegogo and his shitty pet rock scam (his "clever idea" of parodying labubus)
repeatedly claims that CultureHustle is a non-profit when it is NOT (trading under Bigger Ltd as A PRIVATE LIMITED COMPANY via Gov.UK)!
The subreddit for his company r/culturehustle and recent Trustpilot reviews are full of unhappy customers whose orders were held up for months all while he promotes new products and gimmicks on his instagram. Five star reviews pop up on TP from accounts with 1 reviews amidst many 1-star reviews. He only ships when customers contact their banks/credit card companies for fraud
In 2023, Semple ran a kickstarter for Abode to make his own take on Adobe products yet offered NO mockup screenshots/features/solid pitch besides perpetual license. He raised $250k based on the goodwill he had from fans andd two years later, he fired two rounds of developers and all there is videos of his own prototype with it many coming the conclusion he's using AI vibe coding as he previously claimed to hire geeks to do his programming but suddenly he's coding the thing himself. the comments are filled with unhappy backers
On r/culturehustle, his former Abode developer Moira has accused him on not paying her and harassment. Semple tried to blame her but has been flamed by his backers and customers and KS and Reddit for his failure to take responsibility as a business owner.
Semple's marketing tactics to me are similar of that to Brewdog painting themselves as good guys for "anti-sponsoring" Qatar's Fifa World Cup in protest of Qatar's human rights violations yet screening World Cup matches in their pubs and selling beer in Qatar or how Alex Jones/Infowars riled up their paranoid viewers in otder to sell supplements. He twists narratives and uses people's (valid) distrust of corporations in order to SELL a solution. If he was a good guy, he could've been transparent about the pigments he uses and where he gets them. He could've used made Abode merch to fund open source projects that actually made creative tools accessible to all like Blender or Krita (linked their donation pages if you want to fund legit WORTHWHILE software instead of vaporware).
To quote Technology Connections,
"The world is complex and you should be skeptical of simple narratives"
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