A cube consisting of 186 kg of pure 24-karat gold was built and dropped in the middle of Central Park in Manhattan. German artist Niclas Castello designed the cube, and while it is not for sale, it is estimated to be worth over $11.7 million.
The gold was acquired for $1,788 per ounce, and the entire 410-pound artwork has its security detail! The box was placed early on the morning of 3rd February at the park’s Naumburg Bandshell venue.
“[The work] is a conceptual work of art in all its facets.” He said the idea was to “create something that is beyond our world — that is intangible,” Castello said in a statement.
The Castello Coin, a cryptocurrency, will be introduced alongside the cube. It will be exchanged as $CAST and purchased online for $0.44 per unit. Before the presentation, Castello pumped up New Yorkers and visitors alike with a vehicle that displayed the cube’s coordinates. It also served as a promotion for the Castello Coin, an NFT that will launch later this month.
According to the art journal gallerist Lisa Kandlhofer, “the cube can be seen as a sort of communiqué between an emerging 21st-century cultural ecosystem based on crypto and the ancient world where gold reigned supreme.”
The cube was manufactured at a foundry in Aarau, Switzerland, and it necessitates the use of a handmade kiln. The one-of-a-kind oven was created to accommodate the gold’s massive size and volume.
Exceptionally high temperatures, reaching 1,100 degrees Celsius, were also required to melt the materials. As a result, the box is roughly a foot and a half long and a quarter-inch thick on all sides.
Castello was born in East Germany in 1978 and specialized in contemporary art and street and pop art.
Much of his art is motivated by the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and many of his paintings are inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s neo-expressionist era. He now divides his time between New York and Switzerland.