Maurizio Cattelan stole the show at last year’s fall marquee auctions in New York with his banana duct-taped to a wall that sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s. During this November’s fall sales, the Italian conceptual prankster is likely to make a bigger splash, after Sotheby’s announced that it is selling his infamous 18-karat, solid gold toilet.
Titled America (2016), the work will be installed in a bathroom in the Breuer Building, Sotheby’s new HQ, and visitors will be invited to view it one-by-one from November 8. Despite it being a fully functioning toilet, and the fact that museum-goers have previously been free to relieve themselves via the artwork, there will be a ban on the can this time around.
And in an auction first, when the 100-kilogram toilet hits the block at the house’s “The Now and Contemporary” evening sale on November 18, the starting bid will be determined by the price of the work’s weight in gold. That is expected to be around $10 million. “Cattelan’s incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value has never felt more timely,” Sotheby’s said in a statement.
America is an edition of three plus two artist proofs. The version coming to Sotheby’s was made in 2016 and was acquired by the present owner in 2017 from Marian Goodman Gallery. Sotheby’s confirmed to ARTnews that the work does not carry an irrevocable bid ahead of the sale.
America made its exhibition debut at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016. Back then, visitors were encouraged to use the toilet, also installed into one of the museum’s rotunda bathrooms, as they would any other. More than 100,000 people lined up to create their own masterpiece in what the museum dubbed “unprecedented intimacy with a work of art.”
Three years later, the golden sculpture’s notoriety reached new heights when it was exhibited in the UK at Blenheim Palace, the 18th-century stately home and UNESCO world heritage site that’s the former home of Winston Churchill. In an audacious smash-and-grab (à la Louvre jewel heist), thieves stole the plumbed-in golden toilet. That particular version, which was valued at $6 million, has never been recovered. Police believe it was broken into pieces and dumped. Three British men were eventually convicted for their role in the theft.
“America is among Cattelan’s most iconic and influential works,” David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, told ARTnews. “This work marked his return to art-making after a five-year hiatus, following the announcement of his retirement on the occasion of his Guggenheim retrospective. It perfectly encapsulates the ideas and conceptual currents that Cattelan has pursued over the course of his decades-long career, taking a piercing look at the systems that shape the art world and our broader cultural landscape.”
There are unmistakable parallels between Cattelan’s toilet and Marcel Duchamp’s iconic, ready-made urinal artwork, titled Fountain (1917). Galperin said America is “almost impossible to explain without referencing Duchamp’s fountain.”
He continued, “Cattelan revisits the original provocation of Duchamp’s gesture, but turns it further on its head. Whereas Duchamp took a readymade object and elevated it to the status of art through contextualizing it as an artwork, Cattelan re-creates the readymade entirely, fashioning an exact functioning replica out of gold. And rather than putting it on a pedestal in a gallery, Cattelan enters the museum through the most unexpected of contexts.”
Last year, after Sotheby’s announced that it would accept cryptocurrency for Cattelan’s banana duct-taped to a wall, it was bought by Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who later ate it. Crypto-enthusiast collectors Ryan Zurrer and Cozomo de’ Medici (a pseudonym) also chased the lot. Sotbeby’s will again be accepting crypto for America, and the house is expecting interest from “seasoned, established collectors of contemporary art, as [much as] new ones, that includes those collectors who are active in the crypto community,” Galperin said.
One thing is certain: whoever buys America next month will end up sitting on an absolute fortune.
