Solid gold toilet worth $10 million set to go under the hammer
Described as the most valuable toilet in the world, the massive gold toilet named “America” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan will be hammered at Sotheby’s.
The fully functional cistern, which is literally worth its weight in gold, will be offered for sale, the auction house announced Friday.
Sotheby’s calls the work “a sharp commentary on the conflict between artistic production and commodity value.”
The statue is the same one that garnered international attention after being stolen from Blenheim Palace in England in a daring robbery in 2019.
The auction is scheduled to take place in New York on November 18, and the starting price reflects the value of 101.2 kilograms (223 pounds) of gold, currently estimated at around $10 million.
David Galperin, director of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in New York, said Cattelan was “the art world’s provocateur par excellence.”
He is also one of the most successful artists; His piece “Comedian,” a banana taped to a wall, sold for $6.2 million at an auction in New York last year. Cattelan’s disturbing sculpture “O” depicting a kneeling Hitler sold for $17.2 million at Christie’s in 2016.
The artist said “America” satirizes excessive wealth.
“No matter what you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same in terms of the toilet,” he once said.
Two versions of “America” were created in 2016. The one sold had been owned by an anonymous collector since 2017.
The other version was exhibited in the bathroom of the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016. More than 100,000 visitors lined up to interact with the work – to put it delicately.
Guggenheim offered this work to US President Donald Trump during his first term in office, after he asked to borrow a painting by Van Gogh.
In 2019, it was exhibited at Blenheim Palace, the English country estate that was the birthplace of Winston Churchill.
It was stolen by thieves who entered the building within a few days, was forcibly removed from the plumbing and escaped.
Earlier this year, two men were convicted and jailed. The toilet was never recovered. Investigators think it was likely disintegrated and melted.
Galperin doesn’t want to speculate on how much “America” could sell for. Cattelan’s duct-taped banana, he notes, raises questions about “how to value something that essentially has no value other than its authorship and conceptual idea.”
“‘America’ is in many ways the exact opposite of that. It’s the perfect foil in that this work has a lot of inherent value that a lot of works of art don’t have,” he said.
“The ratio of value between raw materials and artistic idea is very much on the table here.”
“America” will be on display at Sotheby’s new headquarters, the Breuer Building in New York, from November 8 until the auction. It will be in the bathroom and visitors will be able to see it up close and personal, but will not be able to use it.
At the Guggenheim and Blenheim Palace, the toilet was connected to the plumbing system and visitors could make a 3-minute appointment to use the toilet. This time visitors won’t be able to use it; They can look, but they can’t flush.
