Light Cue 23

Link

“Pantone asserts,” says Wikipedia, “that their lists of color numbers and pigment values are the intellectual property of Pantone and free use of the list is not allowed” (which didn’t stop the Scottish parliament debating whether to specify the Scottish flag, legally, as Pantone 300).

We humans are so reliant on our systems of description and standardization that we often mistake them for the things they describe. Whoever can assert ownership of the description system can assert ownership of the thing described. Like any unnecessary extension of ownership or copyright, this is on the whole a rather bad thing. Think of Craig Venter trying to patent life itself.

Would the genius who could codify and describe smell (and so far nobody has come up with a way to do it) be considered some kind of “owner of smell”? Would such a system refresh and rebrand the whole image of smell, and could it be tied into dozens of marketing campaigns? Would it take substantial advertising to remind us that we have noses, and that noses smell things, and that this is, by and large, a pleasure?

On the plus side, when somebody invests in something as general as colour or smell, they sink a lot of money into increasing our awareness of it. And consumer choice (much more pathetically narrow than it’s held up to be) really is widened by, say, the Play! Color! phone range — no other range of phones comes in anything like twenty different colours. And what happens when you pick out the colour you want, and leave the store, is that the ranged, Platonic, theoretical, proprietorial Pantone colour system — the langue of colour, the colour strategy itself — turns into a particular, personal colour choice, a commitment: colour as parole, a “speech act”, a tactic, a hack, an act of praxis.