A German artist is drawing the attention of New Yorkers by deciding to build a cube of 186 kilograms of gold cigar of 24 carats, to later place it in the middle of Central Park.
The German artist, named Niclas Castello, was the person who designed the cube and, although the artwork is not for sale, it is valued at about $11.7 million dollars.
The gold was bought at $1,788 dollars an ounce, and as expected the complete artwork of 410 pounds is protected by its own security team.
The bucket was placed in the area known as the Naumburg Bandshell in the park.
“(The cube) is a work of conceptual art in all its facets” said Castello, who also added that the idea was to create something that is beyond our world, that was intangible.
Along with the gold cube, a cryptocurrency is also being launched, called Castello Coin. It can now be purchased online for $0.44 cents each cryptocurrency. An auction of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, is also scheduled for 21 in February. .
Gallerist Lisa Kandlhofer said that the cube can be seen as a kind of communication between an emerging cultural ecosystem of the 21st century based on cryptography (cryptocurrencies) and the ancient world where gold was king , as reported in the New York Post.
The cube melted at a foundry in Aarau, Switzerland, and required a hand-made furnace to be used. The special furnace was created to be able to contain the large size and volume of the gold.
To melt all that gold, extremely high temperatures were also needed to melt the materials, reaching 1,100 degrees Celsius. The box measures a little over a foot and a half on all sides and is only a quarter of an inch thick.
The valuable cube was unveiled at a private dinner on Wall Street on Wednesday in the evening.
The artist, Niclas Castello, was born in 1978 in East Germany and focuses on creating contemporary artwork as well as street and pop art.
Much of his art is influenced by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and many of his pieces are inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s era of neo-expressionism. He currently lives and works in both New York and Switzerland.
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