If you’ve ever wished your commode could communicate luxury, it may be time to throw your hat in the ring for “America.” The solid gold, functioning toilet sculpture by artist Maurizio Cattelan is headed to auction. The toilet will be displayed on public view at Sotheby’s in New York for a limited time before heading to market next month, where the starting figure is set around $10 million based on its inherent value, per CNN.
“America” has quite an interesting history. It was installed in the Guggenheim in 2016, where some 100,000 not only saw but actually used the gold toilet. In 2017, President Donald Trump asked the Guggenheim to send him over a van Gogh work for the White House. In a thumb-biting gesture, the Guggenheim offered to have the well-used gold toilet installed instead. Trump declined to take the museum up on its offer, and in 2019 the piece was stolen from an English palace—the Great Gold Toilet Heist, if you will. The thieves were ultimately convicted earlier this year, but the original “America” was never recovered. However, Cattelan made more than one throne, and the second edition (which has been in the hands of a private and anonymous owner since 2017) is the one on the auction block. This edition, which Sotheby’s believes is the only version of “America” still in existence, is also presumably used, though it will not be available for public use at the auction house the way it was at the Guggenheim.
Cattelan called the piece “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent,” commenting (via the Guggenheim), “Whatever you eat, a two-hundred-dollar lunch or a two-dollar hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise.” David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, told CNN, “The starting bid in accordance with the price of gold was really a way to lean into the very essence of the conceptual basis behind the artwork, which is largely to draw attention to the difference between a work’s artistic value, and a work’s inherent material value.” The gold toilet challenges how we ascribe value to art “by being in so many ways, intrinsically valuable, in a manner that so many works of art are not,” he said.
“Cattelan, for his entire career, has critiqued the system, whether it’s the viewers’ experience seeing art in a museum, the way that works of art move through the system, the way that they’re valued, the way that they change hands,” Galperin explained. “All of these concepts are things that artworks so rarely confront head on. His ability to do that and do it in such a legible way and impactful way is part of its success here.”
