Love Art - Gold / Limited Edition Review
Art Review
Information technology's Gold, Baby. But Niclas Castello's Cube Is Nothing New in Fine art.
The artist's solid gold cube, which appeared for ane day in Central Park, was Instagram bait, an NFT promotion and even kind of pretty.
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The fun thing about conceptual art is that it's totally easy to create. Yous can say something nigh the increasingly virtual way many of us experience the world, and the explosive popularity of NFTs (nonfungible tokens) — or seem to say something profound, anyway — just by staging a Central Park happening around a knee-high cube of 24-karat gilt.
At least, that's what the German pop artist Niclas Castello has done. His "Castello Cube," bandage from more than than 400 pounds of Nevadan gold, appeared in a patch of icy slush opposite the Naumburg Bandshell on Wednesday, preceded by an over-the-top marketing entrada that included a wraparound ad in that morning's edition of The New York Times. Related NFTs from the creative person and even a new digital currency, Castello Coin, volition driblet later in the month. The artist did privately presell enough of the coins to finance this project, co-ordinate to Marina Dertnig, a fellow member of the production team. The cube is not solid all the way through: it has a hollow core. Merely the gold alone is worth more than $10 meg at current prices. And Castello, 43, underlined the rarity of the cube equally an art object by displaying information technology for only a single day, and by promising that it wouldn't exist sold.
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When I visited, the cube was surrounded by a steady trickle of gawkers, some of whom had come to run across the fine art and others drawn by the crowd itself. "I dear a group of people staring at a box," said Isabel Robin, an role player and tour guide.
After all, the last fourth dimension New Yorkers got to come across such a sizable chunk of gold in public was in 2016-2017, when Maurizio Cattelan installed his 18-karat gilded toilet, "America," at the Guggenheim Museum.
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Some visitors in Primal Park were swayed by the beauty of the fabric. "The reflections are incredible," said Brigitte Bentele, a watercolorist and retired educator, "and putting it at that place in the snow seems really inspired." Others, like a private security baby-sit, Jamel Rabel, were dismayed by the gap between the hyperbolic advertisements for the slice — "Never before in the history of humanity has such an enormous corporeality of aureate been bandage into a single, pure object" — and its rather more pocket-sized presence. "It's pretty plain," he said.
I'd say they're both right. From a few anxiety away, the tiptop face of the cube looked every bit slippery and frail every bit a sheen of rainwater, reflecting the tree line. Stepping in close, I constitute a few picayune black marks left in the soft metal by the compressed sand in which the cube had been molded in Aarau, Switzerland. When the creative person's crew ready pink lights for their camera, the cube seemed to change color from dusky copper to bright xanthous. The edges looked abrupt but besides, somehow, giving. There's a reason people like gold.
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Castello, who hung out at the site, was chic in black, with long pilus and bright blue glasses. In the past, he created what he called "cube paintings" with canvases crumbled inside acrylic, and was involved in the European street fine art movement.
But does his current public work add anything to what the Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi already said about shiny surfaces in the 1920s-30s with his gorgeous bathetic bronze birds? Or to Donald Judd'south exhaustive exploration of cubes in the 1960s? Does a one-twenty-four hours-only pop-up display really update 1960s happenings in the Sheep Meadow, or the release of a express-edition Supreme T-shirt, in any meaningful sense? Can it compete with the imperial lines of the saffron-orangish gates Christo erected in Central Park in 2005? Does it elucidate the tension between artful and commodity value, or offer a fresh insight on the gilded standard 50 years after Nixon junked it?
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What the "Castello Cube" really speaks to is the cocky-sustaining power of capital. If you have the resource to get hold of $x or $11 one thousand thousand dollars' worth of gold from a UBS Banking concern in Switzerland — as Castello did — and and so pay a centuries-old bell foundry there to shape it into a cube, and finally to send this cube to the nearly visible park in the finance capital of the Western world, you can get people to look at it, talk about it and review it — and then, in what is shaping upwardly to exist the new gold standard, sell the whole feel as an NFT.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/arts/design/gold-cube-niclas-castello.html
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