A pure gold cube worth AED40 million on display at New York’s Central Park

Anyone in the vicinity of New York City within Central Park would have seen something pretty unusual in recent times.

It’s hard to miss because it’s a huge cube made out of pure gold that is surrounded by security detail.

And the security guards make sense because it’s made out of one of the most expensive metals going and worth around $11.7 million (AED40m) which means it needs all the protection it can get.

The bizarre artwork — called simply Golden Cube — was created by German artist Niclas Castello, who had a special kiln built in order to cast his cube of 186 kilograms of pure 24-karat gold.

The cube required temperatures of 1,100C in order to make the box of just over a foot and a half, which also has a thickness of around a quarter of an inch.

It was brought out for the first time into the Naumburg Bandshell, where it was left for the rest of the day.

It isn’t for sale — as per the artist’s team — but based upon the current price of gold it would fetch at least $1,788 (AED6,567) per ounce.

It weighs in at 410 pounds, which explains why the overall valuation is so huge.

Castello told Artnet News that the work is ‘a conceptual work of art in all its facets’ and said that his overarching idea behind the whole project was to ‘create something that is beyond our world—that is intangible’.

Because this is the wretched year of our Lord 2022, the artwork is also accompanied by a cryptocurrency, which was launched in conjunction with the cube.

It’s called the Castello Coin and will be traded as $CAST.

You can buy units – is that what they’re even called? – online for $0.44 (AED2) each.

An auction of NFTs will also take place on February 21.

Still, you won’t be able to buy a giant gold cube, will you?

At least that will retain some of the worth it has now in future years.

Gallerist Lisa Kandlhofer said that ‘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.’

Source: Agencies