In and Out

@heartstoppercentral June 2022 Pride Celebration: Day 1. favorite character - Charlie Spring

Charlie. What? You just spaced out.

+ please listen to his soft "what"

this could help so much when i need a reference for a bg but can't find the right image :OOO

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.

1. “Anish Kapoor is however a penis” is the best line in this post.

Actually this one turned out to be much tighter than I wanted so I’m really wondering if it looks Sargent enough. Sprezzatura and me just never got along very well...

The main reference painting for this piece is Rose-Marie Ormond (1912). Sargent referred to the lady as “the most charming girl that ever lived.” Coming from someone as formidable as him, this remark is really something...

It is true. 

Long ago, people lived forever, and when they were done with everything they had wanted to do, they would take a bus to Bognor Regis, on the English south coast, and sleep in small seaside bed and breakfast hotels. They would spend the days walking along the seafront, possibly crunching along the shingle. Hundreds of them to begin with, but eventually millions, and then millions of millions. Needless to say, Bognor Regis became uncomfortably crowded, and there was nowhere to buy an ice cream or even a postcard. All of the Bed and Breakfasts had “No Vacancies” signs up. 

I was only a boy, but I could see that this was untenable. “What if,” I suggested, “We make it so that instead of going to Bognor by bus, people who have finished just stop existing, and rot down. And what if we make it so it’s always been like this?”

“You are seven years old,” they said to me. “It will be many years before you take the bus to Bognor. Why do you let this bother you?”

“Because this is not tenable,” I told them. It was a big word I was proud of knowing and I used it whenever I could. “By that time the town will be so full that I will have to sleep on the pebbled beach at night, or even in the road. It will not be a good thing.”

I showed them my drawings, which included suggestions for how death would work, and stressed that for it to be successful it would also need to apply to everything else as well. Not just people.

“Even cats?” they asked.

“Even cats,” I told them.

“The cats won’t like that,” they said. But the cats thought it was going to be great, and explained to us that they had plans for the mice and the birds under the proposed system, and my invention caught on. These days almost nobody remembers what it was like before.

...