Hi, @7outerelements! I’m one of the aforementioned bloggers known for routinely screaming into the void about the misinformation that fuelled the Semple/Kapoor feud, and I promise you this has nothing to do with “narrative symmetry” as it relates to the NFT issue, nor does it boil down to using race and ethnoreligious affiliation to emphasise victimhood.
In fact, if you go to my #TEAM KAPOOR tag, you’ll see I’ve been yelling about this since 2017, meaning it can’t be about finding narrative symmetry in relation to recent events, because NFTs did not even exist five years ago.
This is basically a rehash/repost of what’s already in that tag, but just for posterity:
Vantablack is a substance that is extremely expensive and difficult to make. To quote this article: “It’s not a pigment or a paint, you can’t just buy a bucket of it and dip a brush in and slather it onto your walls. The nanotubes that make up Vantablack must be grown in the Surrey NanoSystems lab using a complicated (and patented) process involving several machines, a few layers of different substances, and some extreme heat. From start to finish, applying Vantablack to an object can take up to two days.” For this reason, the company—nobody else—decided to only work with one artist, and they chose Kapoor. They even said they would reassess the exclusivity agreement if things changed, but that—because it was such a new and potentially dangerous material—they wanted to have control over how it was used. This is not stuff that was going to be readily available to the masses for at-home use; it’s literally shit that could be used in paramilitary black ops.
Semple knew all of this, yet he deliberately chose to misrepresent the details of Kapoor’s Vantablack agreement to the greater public, and then harnessed all the outrage he manufactured to sell a line of pigments that he’d already been developing (no, the “Pinkest Pink” was not actually made in response to Kapoor).
Semple also allowed everyone to think he was this great underdog proletarian hero, when in actuality, he was already a fairly well-established artist who had semi-recently been accused of not paying his employees.
While I don’t think it was a deliberate move, Semple’s twisting of the truth ending up making it so that a lot of people were very comfortable using language that sounded kinda dogwhistle-y when applied to an Indian Jewish immigrant.
Semple saw/heard that language being applied to Kapoor and continued to encourage the hate-fest without any retraction because his paints were selling.
And now the bloke is into NFTs, which are ten kinds of terrible, and all I can say is I’M NOT SURPRISED.
Now, none of this means Kapoor is therefore a great guy, or even a good artist. I’m lukewarm on a lot of his work, tbh. It just means, if you are going to dislike Kapoor, you ought to do it for legitimate reasons, none of which should have anything to do with Semple’s manufactured outrage over Vantablack.
So no, it’s not about narrative symmetry, or emphasising minority status as a symbol of goodness. It’s just about me and few others being pissed at Semple over this Vantablack stuff for like literally five years now, and being glad he’s finally getting called out for some of his shit.
Send Post, TEAM KAPOOR OUT.
Edit to add: This does not mean you should go on Twitter and bully Stuart Semple for being involved with NFTs, jfc. I will add that his team (he’s apparently taking a break from social media due to the backlash) are now claiming he’s not into NFTs, though a lot of his previous tweets negate that, in my personal interpretation. But regardless, cyberbulling is bad; it was bad when Semple encouraged people to do it to Kapoor, and it’s bad now. I am annoyed that Semple twisted a narrative for his own personal gain and didn’t back down from it, and I think he should come clean on that, but ffs asking for accountability =/= sending people threats on Twitter. Don’t fucking do that.
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