Artist Stuart Semple takes a swipe at NFT vendors claiming exclusive rights to hues

Multidisciplinary artist Stuart Semple is taking aim at a new marketplace for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, that has internet activists and artists up in arms for offering the right to own a colour on its platform.

The Color Museum has raised concerns — and amassed a large waiting list — for selling the rights to hues on its platform. 

Using cryptocurrency, the site sells NFTs of individual colours that people can then own the digital rights to, and trade on its marketplace. "We're going to be turning colours into money," the company's founder, Omar Farooq, told Vice's Motherboard last month. 

Semple is one of many who fear the move could become a slippery slope as the internet continues to evolve. He told Day 6 host Peter Armstrong the concept of selling colour-based NFTs is "diabolical" and he felt he needed to respond. 

"It's horrendous. It raises a lot of questions and a lot of things that we need to discuss and think about," said Semple.

The Color Museum says it has 10,000 individual NFTs for sale on its platform. According to the company, it has minted more than 500 and has a waiting list of over 20,000 people. Owners collect royalties on their NFTs every time their hue is used on another NFT on The Color Museum's platform, and they can buy, sell and speculate with their NFTs.

In response, Semple released his own NFT platform, Six Zeros, offering one million black NFTs to challenge the idea of commodifying pixels. The project mocks the colour NFT model and dismisses the idea of owning coloured pixels, which are free to everyone. 

"Why would you buy nothing unless you want to speculate?" Semple said. "[Six Zeros] becomes a piece of conceptual art about speculation in crypto assets."

Semple says that only one person has minted an NFT so far on Six Zeros.

"When you take the idea that you can get rich off the art off the table — that anyone can access it without having to pay — then strangely enough it seems that human beings aren't interested in owning it."

In an email to CBC Radio, The Color Museum's Farooq disputed Semple's characterization of their work.

Pushing back against greed

Semple is a well-known artist in his own right, but he has also made a name for himself by spearheading campaigns against artists and companies that retain ownership of colours, such as the internationally-renowned artist Anish Kapoor. 

Semple led a years-long battle against Kapoor after he bought the exclusive rights to Surrey NanoSystems' Vantablack. 

With the hashtag #ShareTheBlack and crowdsourcing, Semple's campaign included creating the pinkest pink and Black 3.0, an acrylic paint available to artists either as an open source code or as a product on his studio's website, CultureHustle. 

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Semple said his fight with Kapoor concerned the monopoly of a physical substance, and his beef with The Color Museum is different. He called The Color Museum's idea of owning colour in the digital realm ludicrous, but thinks it is also dangerous territory.

"What it does start to do is to legitimize the idea that people can own and profit [from] and manipulate the usage of colours, and I think that's a really sort of dangerous thing to be propagating," Semple told Day 6.

"There's a lot of greed involved in that."

For its part, The Color Museum says it's taking aim at a larger competitor, NFT platform Open Sea, stating that they aim to create a platform that is more equitable to sellers and buyers. In his interview with Vice's Motherboard, Farooq said this is a move to share the wealth more equitably.

While Semple and other critics see The Color Museum as representing the worst of Web 3.0, or the next phase of the internet, he did see some hope for changing the narrative around how technology is developed, especially as artists were involved in that dialogue.

"I think the world is about to be very different very, very, very, very quickly. Now artists are at the forefront of this technological thing with NFTs, and it's fascinating and it's brilliant", he said. 

"But, I think it's really important we show up and ask the questions.... And make something good out of it, because otherwise it's going to be an utter disaster."

Written and produced by Melody Jacobson.