On November 18th, Sotheby’s will sell Maurizio Cattelan’s 18-karat gold toilet sculpture America (2016) with a starting bid of $10 million.
The fully functioning toilet, cast from 101.2 kilograms of solid gold, will open bidding based on its bullion value—a figure based on its precious metal content that could fluctuate until the time of the sale. At today’s rate, its weight puts the starting bid in the region of $10 million. Sotheby’s will be accepting cryptocurrency payments for the work, which was sold in 2017 by Marian Goodman Gallery to a private collector.
“America is Maurizio Cattelan’s tour de force,” said David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s New York, in a statement. “Holding both a proverbial and literal mirror to the art world, the work confronts the most uncomfortable questions about art, and the belief systems held sacred to the institutions of the market and the museum. In his grandest Duchampian gesture, Cattelan unravels a century of art history while imagining a new way of thinking: with his characteristic fearlessness, conceptual genius, and searing humor.”
The first edition of the work was initially installed in 2016 in a restroom at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, where visitors were invited to use the toilet as they would any other. More than 100,000 people reportedly queued for the chance to do so. It was exhibited by the Guggenheim from September 2016 to September 2017. During the first Trump Administration in 2018, the White House reportedly requested a Vincent van Gogh painting for the president; instead, the Guggenheim offered the golden toilet as a loan. The work’s notoriety increased in 2019 when the toilet was stolen from Blenheim Palace, a museum in Oxfordshire, England. That edition was never recovered, and the work auctioned by Sotheby’s is “ the only extant version of this sculpture,” according to the auction house
This sale comes one year after another Sotheby’s spectacle involving Cattelan. Last November, the artist’s Comedian (2019)—the infamous banana duct-taped to a wall that first exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach— fetched $6.2 million at the auction house, smashing its $1.5 million high estimate. The banana was acquired by Justin Sun, a Chinese entrepreneur and founder of the cryptocurrency platform TRON.
Sotheby’s will install the work in a functioning bathroom at its newly opened New York headquarters at the Breuer Building this November during the run-up to the sale. Cattelan’s current auction record is Him (2011), which sold for $17.2 million at Christie’s New York in 2016.
