To own a colour
A small journey into the history, the science and the philosophy of colour
This is a letter of The (Im)posture ā the newsletter from Julien Posture. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox,Ā consider subscribing.
āWe are inside a sculpture. A volume with translucent walls and whose ceiling is covered with LED lighting that is itself filtered by three different colours, the primary colours, blue, yellow and red. And this space is filled with an artificial fog, and as the fog crosses the filtered coloured light, it somehow materializes this light and gives it a colour and a materiality. Ultimately, we do not look at the colour, the colour is nearly within us, as an experience.ā Ann Veronica Jensen
In January 2022, Omar Farook created the NFT platform Color Museum, a software allowing its users to āmintā (i.e. buy and exclusively own) colours. The website limited to 10,000 the number of shades available for purchase (out of millions of colours perceivable by human eyes). Colours, Farooq says, are a kind of āmeta NFTā allowing the owner to collect royalties on the use of a minted shade by other users in āregularā NFTs. Immediately, the initiative garnered a lot of criticisms, probably best summed up by this one reply to the original post of the Color Museum : āwhy does every fucking thing have to be owned and monetized jesus christā.
The idea of owning colours would feel at home in Through The Looking-Glass. A fancy looking man with a rainbow moustache and a long trench coat of a nameless colour would propose to a puzzled Alice to purchase a colour. Why ? she would ask. Rather, I wondered how can you sell a colour ? Unlike some reporting, Iām not sure the matter is about art at all. When Farooq explains heās āgoing to be turning colours into moneyā, itās clear he doesnāt have any idea of the complex relation art, colours and value have always entertained. And if we believe the number of negative comments the project triggered on Twitter, the idea struck a chord, but which one ?
What is a colour worth ?
Colour and economy have long been partners in crime in the art world and beyond. Back in the days (take the Middle Ages or the Quattrocento for example), some pigments were harder to find than others, and as always, scarcity engendered value. In XVth century Italy, when prominent figures were commissioning paintings from artists (illustrators ?) such as Piero della Francesca or Domenico Ghirlandaio, colour specifications were often part of the contract. Through the study of such contracts, art historian Michael Baxandall has shown how colour, and especially ultramarine, was of prime concern. In an agreement between Domenico Ghirlandaio and the Prior of the Spedale degli Innocenti at Florence for the realization of the Adoration of the Magi (1488), we can read :
āand he [the painter] must colour the panel at his own expense with good colours and with powdered gold on such ornaments as demand it, with any other expense incurred on the same panel, and the blue must be ultramarine of the value about four florins the ounce [ā¦]ā
Made from Lapiz Lazuli, a mineral imported at great cost from the Levant (modern day Afghanistan), ultramarine was a costly pigment. Unequal in quality, cautious clients specified the value of the ounce of ultramarine to make sure the final result would be as bright and durable as possible. Such an economic context also meant that at the time, seeing ultramarine blue in a painting was hinting to the wealth and status of the commissioner. A sign lost to our contemporary eyes, for whom the millions of colours generated by an RGB screen are of equal value.
500 years after Ghirlandaio, another blue became a hot topic in the art world. International Klein Blue (IKB), a pigment developed -and supposedly patented- by Yves Klein in the 1960s caused a lot of outrage up to this day. How could a single artist claim a colour to his name ? In reality, Klein never really claimed the colour but rather invented āa new medium for conveying an existing colourā. The particular formula of glue and pigments was indeed an invention, but the experience of the colour was never legally protected.
Moving along our brief history of colour and value, contemporary artist Anish Kapoor purchased in 2016 the exclusive rights to use Vantablack, then the āblackest blackā on the market. Rather than a ācolourā, Vantablack is a pigment that can absorb almost 100% of light, resulting in the experience of a perfect pitch black. This of course triggered a wave of outrage, with some creative responses from other artists like Stuart Semple who created the pinkest pink to be sold to everyone but Anish Kapoor.
It seems that colour, while being this universal phenomenon we all get to experience more or less the same way, was always submitted to exclusivity, profit and ego. As you may have noticed by now though, all the examples mentioned so far refer to pigments, the material manifestation of colours. The Colour Museum claims instead to sell colours, as in, the very concept of a colour.
But is it possible to capture, own and sell, the concept of a colour ? To answer this, letās turn to cognitive science and philosophy.
Colours donāt exist
When it comes to basic, we usually know the basics. Visible light is a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that the human eye can perceive (between 400 and 700 nanometres). Lower than that and we fall in infrared territory, at higher frequencies we find ultraviolet and gamma rays. The light hits a bunch of obstacles before reaching our eyes, sometimes some of this wavelengths are ārefractedā or deviated, other times they can be reflected. When light hits a surface, the physical properties of this object -for example the vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays composing the Vantablack paint- reflect some wavelength and absorb others. The remaining light that we end up catching on our retina is the results of this subtraction. The thing is, wavelength donāt actually have colours, they are just electromagnetic waves, the colouring happens all in our eye (and brain). Itās the photo-receptors in our retina that associate each wavelength to a colour. Victoria Finlay puts it this way : āThe best way Iāve found of understanding this is to think not so much of something ābeingā a colour but of it ādoingā a colour.ā
Here is an example to illustrate this counter-intuitive notion, magenta. Magenta doesnāt actually exist, even less than the other colours, because it doesnāt even has a wavelength. Artists will know that to make purple, you need to mix red and blue. But these to colours are on both extremities of the spectrum of visible colours, that means they never meet. When faced with a lack of information, our brain tends to fill up the gap, and in the case of magenta, it simply closes the linear strip of electromagnetic, visible colours into a circle, connecting blue and red together. So a colour is really something we ādoā and not something that āisā. This cognitive understanding of it helps us see why the idea of selling colours can seem ludicrous. It would be like selling the experience of pleasure. We can purchase things that will trigger a pleasure response in ourselves, but not pleasure itself. So the Color Museum project doesnāt have much of a leg to stand on scientifically speaking, but what would philosophers say about it ?
Semiotics, the study of signs and how we interpret them, has a useful concept that actually is at the core of NFTs, the difference between types and tokens. A type is a kind of sign that is abstract and unique, like the idea of beauty or the concept of a tree. Tokens, on the other hand, are concrete thing, like the face of someone we find beautiful or an oak in a park. Non-Fungible Tokens are in this sense very much tokens, since they sediment into a concrete, inalienable form an image. Type-Token relationships are interesting because when we want to affect a type, we often can only do so through an action on one of its token. The fashion industry canāt change the abstract type of beauty in our minds, but it can bombard us with tons of tokens of touched up photographs of models that will eventually alter what we see as beautiful.
When it comes to colour, Ghirlandaio, Klein and Kapoor all were able to purchase, and sometimes regulate access to, tokens. The lapiz lazuli, IKB or Vantablack are all tokens of an abstract concept of a colour. Yet, the Color Museum wants to sell the type itselfā¦ as a token. While the idea of a colour NFT was scientifically dubious, itās philosophically oxymoronic. The distinction between types and token is actually intuitive as this Twitter user articulated about the type āeā and its tokens :
So colours donāt exist, they are not a thing in the world but something we do. Colours are not tokens we can exchange and touch, they are immaterial types, abstractions we only get to know through partial experience. So what is the Color Museum selling exactly?
Naming and owning
When I studied linguistic anthropology at the University of Montreal, one of the most quoted research in the field was Brent Berlin and Paul Kayās on colour terms. Based on experimental data with speakers of different languages, they demonstrated that the ways we classify and name colours is culturally situated and that if we know the number of colour terms present in a language, we can predict which one will exists. If a language had just 2 terms to name colours, it would be dark and light. If it had 3 terms, red will always be the next one, etc. Colour naming then, is profoundly cultural. The Color Museum though, offers to name the colour you purchased however you please.
In a way, this is a very neoliberal relationship to colours that fits like a glove for NFTs. Taking something that was never up for grab in the beginning, creating scarcity and exclusivity (only 10,000 colours available !), and offering the right to name it regardless of community needs. This relation between naming and owning echoes colonial practices of land seizing and cartography, imposing a rigid, individual name on a common good that used to be a lived territory. Owning and naming the immaterial, the visual experience is not new. Think of platforms proposing to name a star for example, what is being sold is not really the star, nor its experience, but the right to name it, for the sake of saying that we do.
I think the reason I was so intrigued by the topic in the first place is that it made me wonder, as an illustrator, what do I sell ? What is the social and cultural context that allows me to identify and name a style as my own ? How do I claim property on these loosely connected elements of colours, textures, brush strokes, ideas, shapes, etc. that constitute it ? Style is greater than the sum of its part, and is therefore as immaterial and subjective as colour. The difference is that style is linked to a person, a life, experiences, desires. It changes overtime. There is something in this world that we either consider so intimate, or so common, that selling them is not only impossible but it is immoral. As this person commented on Twitter, some things seem to be too pure to be owned :
As an artist, this feels humbling. Colours are something we use daily and some of us have particular palettes we use and identify with. This small dive their history, philosophy and anthropology had me feel very small in comparison to the great, long life of colours. I started to write thinking I was going to make a rational, argument against the idea of a colour NFT, but as Iām writing this, I feel colours donāt need it. I think of colours, of shapes, of ideas, and the claim to own or sell any of it seems naive and unnecessary. Looking at the limits of colours and ownership can help us, creatives, think about the immateriality of our own work, the volatile grasp we have on it in our practice.
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