A solid gold toilet, a sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan titled "America," is set to go under the hammer at Sotheby’s, described as the world’s most valuable lavatory.
The auction house announced on Friday that the fully functional cistern, literally worth its weight in gold, will be offered for sale.
Sotheby’s characterises the piece as an "incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value."
The sculpture is identical to one that garnered international attention after being stolen in an audacious heist from England’s Blenheim Palace in 2019.
The auction is scheduled for 18 November in New York, with a starting price reflecting the value of its 101.2 kilograms (223 pounds) of gold – currently estimated at around $10 million.
David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in New York, said Cattelan is “the consummate art world provocateur.”
He’s also one of most successful, an artist whose work “Comedian,” a banana duct-taped to a wall, sold at a New York auction last year for $6.2 million. “Him” – Cattelan’s unsettling sculpture of a kneeling Hitler – sold for $17.2 million at a Christie’s auction in 2016.
The artist has said “America” satirizes excessive wealth.
“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he once said.
Two versions of “America” were created in 2016. The one being sold has been owned by an unnamed collector since 2017.
The other version went on display in a bathroom at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016. More than 100,000 visitors queued up to – to put it delicately – interact with the work.
The Guggenheim had offered the work to U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term in office after he had asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting.
In 2019, it went on show at Blenheim Palace, the English country manor that was the birthplace of Winston Churchill.
Within days it had been stolen by burglars who broke into the building, forcibly wrenched it from the plumbing, and fled.
Two men were convicted earlier this year and jailed. The toilet has never been recovered. Investigators think it was likely broken up and melted down.
Galperin is unwilling to speculate on how much “America” could sell for. He notes that Cattelan’s duct-taped banana posed questions about “how one assigns value to something that has, in essence, no value aside from its authorship and its conceptual idea.
“‘America’ is in many ways the complete inverse of that. It is a perfect foil in that this work has a lot of intrinsic value in a way that most artworks do not,” he said.
“The question of the proportion of value between the raw materials and the artistic idea is very on the table here.”
“America” will go on display at Sotheby’s new New York headquarters, the Breuer Building, from 8 November until the auction. It will be in a bathroom, and visitors will be able to see it up close and personal – but not use it.
At the Guggenheim and Blenheim Palace, the toilet was connected to the plumbing system and visitors could book a 3-minute appointment to use it. This time, visitors will be not able to use it -- they can look but they can’t flush.
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