A fully functional toilet made from 220 pounds of solid gold, provocatively titled "America," is set to be auctioned at Sotheby's New York next week with a starting price of approximately $10 million. Created by Italian provocateur artist Maurizio Cattelan in 2016, this extraordinary piece represents the latest chapter in art's long relationship with the bathroom and bodily functions.

Art has been playing with sanitary themes for over a century. Marcel Duchamp famously hung a urinal in an exhibition in 1917, and Piero Manzoni sold his own excrement in cans in 1961. However, it was Cattelan who had the audacious idea to cast a fully operational toilet from 220 pounds of gold and declare it a work of art. The piece's suggestive title, "America," adds layers of meaning to this gleaming commentary on wealth and excess.

The current owner, Steven Cohen, is no stranger to valuable assets. Beyond owning the golden toilet, Cohen also owns the New York Mets baseball team. Known as the "Prince of Wall Street" by The New York Times, Cohen clearly has a keen sense for market timing. With gold prices now roughly three times higher than they were in 2017 when he purchased "America," Cohen saw this as an opportune moment to part with the piece during these uncertain economic times.

The artwork's history is as valuable as its gold content. Cattelan originally had two versions of the toilet produced. While Cohen purchased one, the other was installed at New York's Guggenheim Museum, where approximately 100,000 visitors reportedly used the functional facility. The piece gained additional notoriety when the Trump administration requested to borrow Van Gogh's "Landscape with Snow" to decorate Donald and Melania Trump's bedroom. The museum's curators politely declined but offered the golden toilet as a long-term loan instead. Though it seemed perfectly suited for the gold-obsessed Trump, he declined, possibly due to his well-known fear of germs.

In 2019, the toilet was installed for a Cattelan exhibition at Britain's Blenheim Palace. However, shortly after the opening, thieves broke into the palace at night and drove away with the toilet in a small car just minutes later. Two perpetrators have been arrested, but the toilet has never been recovered, making the remaining version even more valuable and unique.

The excitement surrounding "America" has been further fueled by the success of another Cattelan work at auction last year. His famous banana titled "Comedian," which he had taped to a wall, sold for $6.2 million to a young Chinese billionaire. Many thought spending millions on a banana that would turn brown in two days was insane, but Cattelan was simply following the established rules of conceptual art, where the idea matters more than the material or craftsmanship.

With his golden toilet, Cattelan cleverly reverses this concept. He uses 220 pounds of the most expensive and mythically charged material – gold – but transforms it into the most banal and embarrassing object: a toilet bowl. Rather than placing it in a display case, he had it connected by a plumber and made available for actual use, blurring the lines between art and function.

For art investors, this gleaming toilet represents the ideal trophy for uncertain times. They acquire originality backed by gold – a provocation that could be melted down if necessary, as the thieves likely did. Until then, the object can be used at home as intended. Fittingly, Cattelan publishes an appropriate art magazine called "Toiletpaper," completing the circle of his bathroom-themed artistic universe.