Royal Flush: Sotheby’s to Sell 18-Karat Gold Toilet
- Editor OGN Daily
- 28 minutes ago
- 1 min read
The world is clearly going potty as the auction house prepares to put a solid gold cistern under the hammer.
It's a sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan entitled “America” and Sotheby's calls it an “incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value.” 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 price of the just over 101.2 kilograms (223 pounds) of gold used to make it - currently about $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 Adolf Hitler - sold for $17.2 million at a Christie’s auction in 2016.
The artist has said “America” satirises 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. The Independent says that more than 100,000 visitors queued up to - to put it delicately - interact with the work.