Cloud Gate, the large bean-shaped mirror installed in Chicago in 2006, whose maquette is on display at Palazzo Manfrin, has had a rather turbulent public life. In 2018, Kapoor won a lawsuit against the NRA for the unauthorized use of its image in a propaganda video. In November 2025, Border Patrol agents photographed themselves in front of the sculpture after a series of raids in the Latino neighborhood of Little Village: Kapoor compared them to the Nazi SS and is considering another lawsuit. Meanwhile, groups have appeared on Reddit convinced that the sculpture’s reflective surface was being used by the Secret Service to monitor visitors to the park, or that someone is locked inside it.
The Bean — conceived as the collective mirror of a metropolis — has become, despite itself, a political battlefield. And it is only the most emblematic case.
Something similar happened with Vantablack. In 2016, Kapoor acquired the exclusive rights to the artistic use of a military-derived nanotechnology that absorbs 99.96 percent of light, making any surface visually flat, depthless, almost nonexistent. The move provoked a response from the British artist Stuart Semple, who in turn created and put on sale the brightest pink ever produced, with the explicit condition that it could be purchased by anyone except Anish Kapoor.
