Mystery as gold cube worth $11.7million ‘pops up’ in NYC’s Central Park – and it has its own security guards
A MYSTERIOUS gold cube worth an estimated $11.7million appeared in New York's Central Park on Wednesday morning accompanied by its very own security detail.
The cube, composed of 186 kilograms of pure 24-karat gold, was rolled out in front of a snowy Naumburg Bandshell at 5am in the morning surrounded by photographers and NYPD officers.
The hollow gold block is the creation of 43-year-old German artist Niclas Castello, who has branded it the "Castello Cube."
The 410-pound work is not for sale but was used as publicity for the launch of accompanying cryptocurrency, the Castello Coin.
With gold currently priced at $1,788 per ounce, it is worth up to $11.7millon if it were to be put up for sale.
Castello's team told ArtNet that the cube was made in a foundry in Aarau, Switzerland.
It was reportedly cast using a special handmade kiln as the sheer size and volume of the gold being used required extreme melting temperatures.
In order for all the gold to be melted, the kiln needed to reach a temperature over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.It was then recast into a cube measuring more than a foot and a half.
Castello's Cube has a wall thickness of about a quarter inch.
Castello's wife Sylvie Meis posted pictures to her Instagram of the grand unveiling of the piece of art.
"24k MAGIC," she captioned a picture of herself kneeling in the snow beside the cube.
The cube had been advertised as a once-in-a-lifetime work.
“Never before in the history of humanity has such an enormous amount of gold been cast into a single, pure object," it read.
Some viewers were unimpressed, however.
“It’s pretty plain,” private security guard, Jamel Rabel, told the New York Times.
Another looked admitted that the "reflections are incredible and that "putting it there in the snow seems really inspired.”
ART AND CRYPTO
Catello's Cube stayed in the famous tourist spot for only a few hours before being shipped downtown to the exclusive Cipriani Wall Street for a private dinner.
"With the star of the evening," model and TV personality Meis wrote with a video of her admiring the cube in a matching gold dress.
Castello billed the block as a “socle du monde” (base of the world) sculpture.
He told ArtNet that it is “a conceptual work of art in all its facets” and that he'd wanted to “create something that is beyond our world—that is intangible.”
“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,” Viennese gallerist Lisa Kandlhofer added to ArtNet.
The Castello Coin is being traded as $CAST and is training at an initial price of $0.44.
The artist's team told the New York Times that he had privately sold enough of the coins to finance the cube project.
On February 21, the coin launch will be followed up with an NFT auction.
It is unclear where Catello's Cube will go after its day trip to Central Park.
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