if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in the midwest, this is it.
You missed some of the best ones
the best part about it is that the art installation isn’t actually called the Bean. It’s called Cloud Gate, and artist Anish Kapoor (yes, THAT Anish Kapoor) hates that we call it the Bean.
But i mean, look at it. It’s a bean.
How could you forget this one though
I HAD NO FUCKING IDEA THAT THE BEAN WAS CREATED BY ANISH KAPOOR.
someone help me why is anish kapoor important what did he do?
Alright sit down for some Art World Drama bcause this is what I live for.
So, sometime last year (?) science invented Vantablack, which is the darkest possible shade of black. Art world got incredibly excited. But as it needs to be very carefully made in a lab, it’s hard to get a hold of, and is extremely expensive. Enter Anish Kapoor, aka FuckFace McGee. Anish Kapoor buys the rights to Vantablack. He is the only human being on the planet that can legally use it, and he’s kind of a prick about it.
Art world is not thrilled with that.
Enter Stuart Semple.
Stuart Semple is an artist, and also makes pigments to sell in his free time. Stuart Semple is astoundingly pissed about this Vantablack nonsense, and Anish Kapoor’s dickery. Stuart Semple makes a new pigment, the brightest shade of pink ever, called Pinkest Pink, and puts it for sale on the internet. To be bought by everybody except Anish Kapoor. Literally, to purchase, you need to confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, do not associate with him, and will not sell or give the pigment to Anish Kapoor or his associates. Art world has a good laugh, everyone buys Pinkest Pink because it’s awesome, and damn it we deserve something.
Anish Kapoor however is a penis, and will not take this lying down, because HOW DARE he not have literally everything.
Anish Kapoor gets his London associates to buy him a thing of Pinkest Pink, and being such a classy human being, posts a picture to instagram of him with his middle finger covered in Pinkest Pink, captioned with “Up yours. #pink”
Everyone flips shit, because. Y’know. Fuck that guy. Especially Stuart Semple. For context here, Anish Kapoor is one of the richest artists on the planet, and has repeatedly been referred to as everything wrong with the art world, and the epitome of the art worlds elitism problem. He’s a giant douchebag. Meanwhile Stuart Semple makes pigments just to get them out there. He turns 0 profit from his now enourmously popular pigments.
Stuart Semple launches an investigation as to who the fuck leaked Pinkest Pink, and plans to strike back. He does so by releasing two new products. First is Diamond Dust, which is a glitter made from glass, so that a painting is still visible after it’s applied, but glitters like a mofo. It’s the most reflective glitter out there, and is available to everyone who isn’t Anish Kapoor. And it being made of glass, if you stick your finger in there, it’s going to hurt quite a bit, so that was Stuart Semple’s way of saying “shove your middle finger in this, asshole, see what happens”. Except without saying that, because he can get an insult across while still being fucking classy.
He also releases Black 2.0, created with the help of over a thousand artists worldwide.
Black 2.0 is the answer to Vantablack. Black 2.0 is a slightly less black black, but looks functionally the same to the human eye. It’s completely safe, smells like cherries, and costs four pounds. Vantablack is highly toxic, potentially explosive, needs to be applied in a special laboratory and sealed properly, can’t be moved across borders, can reach 300 degrees celsius if you’re not extremely careful, and costs thousands of dollars. Anish Kapoor is the only human being who can use Vantablack. He is the only human being who cannot use Black 2.0.
So I think we can guess who got the better deal.
And thus the feud ends, Kapoor defeated.
…But not quite.
Kapoor, in this entire afair, has made exactly two comments to the public. The first being his charming message about aquiring Pinkest Pink, the second being claiming to Buzzfeed that he and his small army of lawyers will be suing Semple, an extremely poor artist who cannot afford a lawyer.
No lawsuit has been made yet, fyi.
The point is, Kapoor is a prick, and doesn’t like talking to the lower classes. So one day in July 2017, he decides he needs another floor on his London studio apartment, and starts making arrangements to have it built. His neighbors are fucking pissed, because this will ruin the light of their apartments. They call to Semple to save them, or at the very least piss Kapoor off some more.
Semple answers to the call, and releases two new paints, Phaze and Shift, as always, banned to Kapoor. They change colours, Phaze with temperature, and Shift is just iridescent. Shift needs to be painted over Black 2.0 to work, and Phaze just works on its own.
So that’s been the art world for the last two years.
Basically, get fucked Anish Kapoor your bean sucks and so does your vantablack.
Stuart Semple is organising a bean-kissing event for Anish Kapoor’s birthday.
Anish Kapoor is such a hack….latest Biennale exhibition and he’s still banging on about Vantablack and his beef with Stuart Semple, even ripping off his work AND insulting him.
Really at this point I can’t work out how Anish got famous, there’s not really much there is there? I do find it funny that Stuart is selling a replica version of his work called Biennale In A Box…I suspect this beef will…
Minimalism and Radical Viewer Experience in Anish Kapoor’s Descent Into Limbo
Anish Kapoor, Descension, 2014. Whirlpool, 8 m diameter. Galleria Continua, San Gimignano.
In 2018, an unfortunate visitor to the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal accidentally fell into Anish Kapoor’s 1992 sculpture Descent Into Limbo — an eight foot deep black “pit” in the gallery floor (1).
In the late 1960s, Claes Oldenburg created his Placid Civic Monument, a prototype for what became known as “negative-space sculpture” (2). Less than a decade later, Land Artist Michael Heizer created another “negative sculpture” that resembled Oldenburg’s grave-like Placid Civic Monument on a much larger scale: the 1970 earthwork Double Negative (below),whose two canyon-like trenches changed the landscape of the Nevada desert (3). The LA times called Double Negative “A Hole in the Ground” (4).
These artworks raise interesting questions about the boundary between natural materials and artistic creation as well as the nature of sculpture as an art form. Other artists in the 1960s and 1970s were preoccupied with this as well. Donald Judd described contemporary art as “neither painting nor sculpture,” moving away from “forms” and toward experiences (5) like Joseph Beuys’ participatory, outdoor “social sculpture” (6). There are certainly parallels between the black hole of Descent into Limbo and the human-sized hole in Oldenburg’s Placid Civic Monument.
Anish Kapoor, Descent Into Limbo, 1992. Cubed building with a dark hole in the floor, 6 × 6 × 6 m. Serralves Museum, Porto.
Michael Heizer, Double Negative, 1969-1970. 240,000-ton displacement of rhyolite and sandstone. Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada.
Anish Kapoor’s Descension(above)is also part of the expanded idea of sculpture as formless experience that compelled artists like Donald Judd, who once said that “a work needs only to be interesting” (7). When it was installed in San Gimignano in 2015, gallery visitors could walk right up to the edge of Descensionand watch as the dark, churning water was sucked loudly down an invisible drain. There’s something very unsettling about this whirlpool. Art historian Sarah Andress describes Anish Kapoor’s sculptures as “at once about presence and vacancy, materiality and ethereality…” (8). Many allow visitors to enter and experience them, while others are such voids that they block even the visitor’s gaze from entering the space of the artwork.
This was the case with Descent Into Limbo (above), which looked like a flat circle painted on the floor of the gallery. The visitor who fell into the work in Portugal was certainly surprised by the depth of the work’s interior. I would call his a radical viewer experience, although not a positive one.
Art critic Leo Steinberg was an early proponent of art-viewing as an embodied experience, and described artworks as “situation[s]” involving “the beholder” (9). Minimalist sculptures like Robert Morris’ mirrored cubes (below) (10) were created with viewer experience in mind. As you circumambulate the gallery, your own presence changes and animates the installation. The same thing happens when you walk under Anish Kapoor’s bean-like Cloud Gate in Chicago: you, the sky, and the cityscape are part of the work. Some of Kapoor’s work is heavily influenced by Minimalism — simple forms, industrial materials, and embedded into the world of the viewer. But what about his voids?
Robert Morris, Untitled, 1965, reconstructed 1971. Mirror glass and wood, 91.4 × 91.4 × 91.4 cm (each). Tate.
Donald Judd wrote that “most sculpture is made by part, by addition, composed” (11). When we think of sculpture in the 1960s and beyond in terms of addition we might think of both the positive addition of materials (to create a three-dimensional form) and the addition of the outside world into the artwork itself. From social sculpture to Relational Aesthetics to contemporary artworks that utilize augmented reality, virtual reality, and physiological or affective computing, we as viewers are conditioned to expect participation. In the 1990s, Carol Duncan talked about “the wish for ever closer encounters with art” that affected not only curators and exhibition designers but artists and viewers as well (12). Even more than the negative sculptures of Oldenburg and Heizer, Descent Into Limbo is nothing. Part of what makes this work so extraordinary (and why Kapoor’s exclusive Vantablack paint is so controversial) is because it offers no “phenomenological directness”: viewers can see the artwork in the gallery, but they cannot “enjoy a perceptual experience [where] physical things and their properties seem to be directly present to [them]” (13). Thinking about the visitor who fell into Descent Into Limbo with all of this in mind, it’s perhaps possible to understand how a frustration with Kapoor’s void — a literal black hole that refuses all sensory experience and participation — might create a desire for a radical viewer experience.
5. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” 1.
7. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 4.
8. Sarah Andress, “Atmospheric Pressure,” Art on Paper 13, no. 5 (2009): 18.
9. Kerr Houston, “Leo Steinberg and Robert Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture”,” Notes in the History of Art 33, no. 1 (2013): 39-40.
11. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 3.
12. Carol Duncan, “The Art Museum as Ritual,” in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1994), 433.
13. Boyd Millar, “The Phenomenological Directness of Perceptual Experience,” Philosophical Studies 170, no. 2 (2014): 239.
Captioned because even I’m having trouble reading this:
[A screenshot from snapchat of a document that is cut off on the extreme edges, erasing the first and last two or three letters from each line. Doing my best to correctly transcribe]
Breach of terms of service: culturehustle.com Illegal acquisition on behalf of Anish Kapoor of the World’s Pinkest Pink
Dear Sirs,
I am aware that you represent Mr. Anish Kapoor, and I write today not to dob him in so that you can tell him off but rather to try and resolve this matter. Unlike Kapoor I am not one to ‘point the finger’ however on this occasion it has become important to do so.
I hold your gallery in the highest esteem, I am a fan of several of your artists, but on this occasion you have been extremely naughty. You have been part of a conspiracy to obtain my PINK and provide Mr. Kapoor with it.
We have now finished fully researching this situation and it has come to your attention that you have been part of a conspiracy to obtain my PINK and provide Mr. Kapoor with it enabling him to exploit the substance against my wishes. Further, this juvenile behavior made much of the wider artistic community sad thanks to his extremely petty and childish post on Instagram.
The terms of service on my site CultureHustle.com are incredibly clear: Quote: By adding this product to your cart you agree that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated with Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this product will not make its way into that hands of Anish Kapoor.
In direct violation to the above, on 10th of December 2016 a person by the name of Mr [Blanked out] placed an order via the culturehustle.com website, for one jar of PINK at 5:36 am. This order was placed on behalf of your gallery and was delivered to the Lisson Gallery in London at 11:38 am on the 13th of December. Shortly after which your gallery provided Mr. Kapoor with the substance and on the 23rd of December 2016 Mr. Kapoor posted a photograph on Instagram showing he was indeed in possession of the substance, he also included the caption ‘Up Yours’. The comments on this post clearly demonstrate the negative impact such a gesture has had upon a wide community. He needs to say sorry for hurting everyone’s feelings.
I remind you, hoarding colours and stealing other people’s colours without asking nicely isn’t big -rd it’s simply bad.
I said I think it would be best to resolve this matter amicably without this silly business escalating any further. However, if we are unable to resolve this in a timely and grown up way I am fully prepared to take further action which will no doubt become stressful and expensive.
Therefore I would appreciate it if: 1. Your gallery would say sorry for giving my pink to Mr. Kapoor. 2. Mr. Kapoor would give me my pink back. I don’t want him to have it. 3. He will write 100 times, ‘I will be nice, I will share my colours’ and he will post the same to his Instagram.
Failing the above, an agreeable settlement would also be: 1. The reimbursement of $3.99 (the cost of PINK minus shipping) 2. And Mr. Kapoor to void his exclusive agreement to the use of Vanta Black in art.
If you were to settle as above I will be more than happy to share all my colours with him, so he doesn’t feel left out and can join in with the rest of us.
I look forward to resolving this matter.
Yours,
Stuart Semple
Thank you for captioning this! I’d seen it before but never been able to read it.
Alright this is hilarious because
Since they broke contract, he can sue them
To avoid getting sued, they need to humilate themselves publicly AND convince Kapoor to do likewise
If they don’t want to humiliate themselves and avoid getting sued, they need to convince Kapoor to give up his color copyright
Anish Kapoor - Dismemberment - Gibbs Farm, New Zealand
Gibbs Farm sculpture park is home to a series of major site specific artworks commissioned from some of the world’s most significant artists.
Composed of a vast PVC membrane stretched between the two giant steel ellipses, Kapoor’s work is architectural, and yet it also has a fleshy quality which the artist describes as being “rather like a flayed skin”.
Kapoor has commented, “I want to make body into sky”. At the farm he achieves this. Here, the artist had to devise a form that was both freestanding and capable of surviving a constant arm-wrestle with the sky and the mercurial weather conditions.
