I’m getting really tired of explaining this, but literally nobody was saying that being a minority makes anybody immune from being a jerk. In fact, it’s very likely that Kapoor is a pretentious jerk on other fronts, because a lot of big name modern artists are absolute fusspot divas, and I doubt he’s in any way an exception.
What we are saying is the following:
Semple knew that Surrey NanoSystems were the entity that made the decision to work with one artist only.
Semple knew that Vantablack was never going to be “released to the masses,” because, 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.”
Semple knew that Surrey NanoSystems spokesman Steve Northam said the company would “continuously reassess this agreement [with Kapoor],” going forward, but that at the moment, because it’s such a new and dangerous material, they wanted to have control of how it’s used.
Semple had been working on his pigments well before the any of this happened, and certainly wasn’t making them in response to the Vantablack situation.
Semple was aware that even if Surrey NanoSystems was willing to work with other in the field, it would still just mean that Vantablack was available to like, six or seven wealthy, influential artists instead of only one, because, as stated above, it’s still an incredibly dangerous, expensive, and complex substance that most people would never have access to.
Despite having all this information, Semple chose to start a campaign totally maligning just Kapoor as maniacal hoarder of colours, painting a story in which he, Semple, was the David-like folk hero standing up to the Goliath Kapoor, despite the fact that Semple is also an incredibly wealthy elite artist.
Through this campaign, Semple led a lot of people to believe that Kapoor was guilty of preventing everyday people from (to paraphrase @magnetoisright) buying a jar of Vantablack for £4.99 from Blick, and used that belief and the public hatred he had whipped up for Kapoor to market his own line of affordable pigments—which, again, were already in production before this started, and were not developed as a “reaction” the Vantablack agreement, as many were led to believe.
Semple, a white, wealthy, gentile British dude, knew Kapoor was an Indian Jewish guy, even the rest of you didn’t, and still used some slightly dogwhistley-language in his campaign against Kapoor.
Nobody is saying Anish Kapoor is a great guy or even a good artist. Frankly, I’m not even that into most of his art. Nobody is saying you can’t be a PoC and an asshole, either. We’re just saying that the narrative that has been widely accepted is not wholly accurate and that while it’s not an outright racist attack in any way, there have been some unsavoury, dog-whistley elements to it from the people who originated the discourse, who ought to have known better.
