One hundred kilograms of solid gold and a hookup to the sewers: A shiny toilet is the new darling of the auction season.
Sotheby’s announced on Friday morning that it would offer a toilet made from 18-karat gold by the artist Maurizio Cattelan — the same prankster responsible for the duct-taped banana from 2024 that sold for $6.2 million to a crypto financier.
Cattelan created the golden throne in 2016 as one of two editions of an artwork called “America.” Bidding will start in the region of $10 million, or whatever the price of gold is a few hours before the auction starts on Nov. 18 at 7 p.m., at Sotheby’s new headquarters in the Breuer building on Madison Avenue.
“I would reject the idea that this is just pure spectacle,” David Galperin, vice chairman and head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, said in an interview. “Cattelan for me is one of the greatest artists of our generation and this is one of his most iconic works.”
This version of the commode was sold to a private collector by the Marian Goodman Gallery in 2017.
But its twin toilet — the other edition of the artwork fabricated by the artist — was embroiled in a minor political controversy with the first Trump administration and later became the subject of a brazen heist at Blenheim Palace, a museum in England that was the birthplace of Winston Churchill.
That version was installed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2016 — perhaps the first artwork to require both a security guard and a plumber. More than 100,000 visitors used the toilet, which the museum later offered as a loan to the Trump administration after declining the White House’s request for a painting by Vincent van Gogh that could hang in the president’s living quarters.
“It is, of course, extremely valuable and somewhat fragile, but we would provide all the instructions for its installation and care,” Nancy Specter, the museum’s artistic director and chief curator at the time, wrote in an email to officials.
In 2019, thieves stole the golden toilet while it was on loan at Blenheim Palace. It took prosecutors four years to charge the gang, which had dislodged the artwork from its plumbing and caused a small flood in the room. Two men were found guilty by a jury this year; another person was acquitted of the crime.
Cattelan found the burglary strange, saying it wasn’t “exactly the heist of the century,” but it was “one of the most bizarre.”
Sotheby’s is hoping the artist’s surviving edition of the toilet will help — pun intended — unclog the art market, which has suffered in recent years, in part because the supply of contemporary artworks has overwhelmed the size of the collector base. The auction house is also hoping for a splash, having turned the artist’s duct-taped banana, “Comedian,” into a sensation when it sold to the Chinese crypto billionaire Justin Sun far above its initial high estimate of $1.5 million.
Galperin said that potential buyers should think of “America” as part of a historical lineage that includes Marcel Duchamp, who put a urinal on a pedestal in 1917 and scandalized the art world by calling it a sculpture.
“Duchamp takes the ordinary urinal by signing it and putting it on the pedestal,” Galperin said. “Cattelan renders it like a perfect replica, and rather than putting it on a pedestal, returns it to its use in the most ordinary context.”
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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