The art world's most notorious bathroom fixture is making headlines once again. Maurizio Cattelan's solid gold toilet sculpture "America" - a 220-pound, 18-karat gold throne that captivated over 100,000 visitors at New York's Guggenheim Museum in 2016 - is returning to the spotlight through an unexpected second edition hitting the auction block.
The original "America" became infamous not just for its conceptual audacity, but for its dramatic disappearance. In 2019, thieves armed with sledgehammers executed a brazen five-minute heist at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill's historic birthplace in the English countryside, stealing the fully functional golden toilet. Despite the perpetrators being convicted earlier this year, the original sculpture was never recovered and is believed to have been cut up or melted down for its gold value, worth millions of dollars.
Now, a second edition of the satirical sculpture is making an unexpected debut on the art market. This version has been in private and anonymous hands since 2017, according to Sotheby's, which will auction the piece on November 18 at their New York headquarters. The auction house plans to install the golden toilet in a fourth-floor bathroom for 10 days leading up to the sale, though unlike its Guggenheim predecessor, visitors will not be permitted to use it for security reasons.
The auction structure reflects the conceptual nature of Cattelan's work. Rather than setting a traditional starting bid, the opening price will fluctuate with the gold market right up until bidding begins, currently estimated to be in the $10 million range based on gold's recent record highs. "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," explained David Galperin, Sotheby's head of contemporary art.
The piece has an intriguing political backstory that adds to its notoriety. During Donald Trump's first presidential term, "America" was reportedly offered to his administration in lieu of a Van Gogh painting they had requested from the Guggenheim - a counteroffer that was apparently ignored. This political dimension reinforces the work's satirical commentary on American society and values.
Galperin draws parallels between "America" and another controversial Cattelan work that recently made auction history. He describes the golden toilet as "a perfect foil to Cattelan's other equally infamous banana-on-a-wall, 'Comedian,' which sold for $6.24 million at Sotheby's last fall." The duct-taped banana, worthless without Cattelan's artistic association, originally debuted at Art Basel Miami priced at $120,000 and has been eaten multiple times by various collectors and performance artists.
"If 'Comedian' was all about the intangibility of value and how we ascribe value to works of art, 'America' challenges that a step further by being in so many ways, intrinsically valuable, in a manner that so many works of art are not," Galperin noted. This distinction highlights the unique position of "America" in contemporary art discourse, where material worth intersects with conceptual meaning.
While Cattelan has stated he created "America" in an edition of three, Sotheby's believes this upcoming auction piece may actually be the only physical version still in existence. The auction house does not believe the third edition was ever fabricated, making this potentially the sole surviving example of one of the 21st century's most talked-about artworks.
Beyond its dramatic theft narrative, art experts consider "America" an important contemporary artwork with direct lineage to landmark modern art pieces, particularly Marcel Duchamp's revolutionary 1917 upside-down urinal "Fountain." Galperin emphasizes that "Cattelan, for his entire career, has critiqued the system, whether it's the viewer's 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. All of these concepts are things that artworks so rarely confront head on."
