For sale: the world's most valuable toilet. Sotheby's announced on Friday that it will auction off the solid gold commode, a sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan titled "America." The auction house calls it an "incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value," per the AP. It's also a fully functional toilet, identical to one that gained global fame when it was stolen in an audacious heist from England's Blenheim Palace in 2019. The starting price at the Nov. 18 auction in New York will be the cost of the 223-plus pounds of gold used to make it—currently about $10 million.
David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby's in New York, called Cattelan "the consummate art world provocateur." He's also one of the 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 that "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, seeing more than 100,000 visitors. The Guggenheim had offered the work to US President Trump during his first term in office after he'd asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting.
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In 2019 it went on show at Blenheim Palace, and within days it had been stolen by burglars who broke into the building, forcibly wrenched it from the plumbing, and fled. Galperin is unwilling to speculate on how much "America" could sell for. "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 York headquarters from Nov. 8 until the auction. It will be in a bathroom, and visitors will be able to see it up close and personal, though they won't be able to use it.
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