Ploplet: The Castello Cube
Check your angles.
In most issues of Plop Art, I take a bunch of time to try to understand a piece of art I want to take time to understand, before assigning it a score. In Ploplet, I write about Insta-bait.
I regret to inform you that the 11.7 million dollar golden cube has been removed from Central Park. ARTNET reports that German artist Niclas Castello brought it there Wednesday morning, along with a “heavy” security detail. The 410 pound cube looked quite imposing in the photo that’s going viral on Twitter, foregrounded over an out of focus fountain and bust.
This turned out to be a minor optical illusion: the cube is actually only 18-inches tall. Shoot from a low angle to make yourself, or your extremely expensive cube that is not compensating for anything, look bigger. The oldest trick in the book! It’s also a bit misleading to call the cube “solid gold,” since Castello admits it is hollow. The object ultimately serves as a monument to reckless spending. Fitting that its release (display? drop?) coincides with the launch of a cryptocurrency, which will allow Castello to launder attention he garnered by spending the production budget of Carol (2015) to make more even more money. Good for him.
Nobody involved with the project seems to be trying all that hard to justify its existence. Castello himself called it “a conceptual work of art in all its facets,” which, thanks for nothing. More disappointing is the quote from gallerist Lisa Kandlhofer, who the story highlights as “Viennese.” She says: “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.”
There are few lessons to be learned here. Castello’s art is unbelievably bland, the best things you’ll see on his Instagram feed are pretty obvious riffs on Basqiat. The earnest, philosophical intoning are a clear cover for a lack of creativity. But if I’m honest with myself, I’m a little sad I missed it. Does anyone have 12 million bucks lying around?