The effect is also completely ruined if you handle it, and the broken off nanotubes from handling it are a serious health hazard. It’s expensive, dangerous, extremely fragile and almost impossible to clean.

But like mostly, having seen “Anish Kapoor” (which is the real name of the installation where that dickhead debuted his vantablack art), it… sucks. It’s impressive in photographs, incredibly lame in person. And, it can’t be cleaned without ruining the coating! so the dust from all those people builds up and just ew.

(also, and just on a personal note, he had nine years and did absolutely nothing conceptually interesting with it. Seriously it was the early-2000s 3D movie of art. Just one gimmick, repeated over and over with no change to the formula. “Look, it’s black”. It felt more like an ad for the lab that developed the coating than an art exhibition). It would have been cool if he’d developed the process, but we all know he didn’t, so it just fell so comically flat.