If you have been in the art world for a minute, you have probably attended a benefit gala or two for an art nonprofit. The expectations for these events are pretty well established. After a cocktail hour, attendees get their seat assignments and dine on fine cuisine while they get acquainted and exchange gossip with their neighbors. Remarks are addressed to a restive crowd. Photographers record flashy outfits for the society pages. Perhaps a celebrity auctioneer takes bids on artworks or experiences to raise funds.
But artists are often great at subverting expectations, and the Renaissance Society, a beloved arts venue at the University of Chicago known for its brainy exhibitions, has for several years now invited artists to direct its annual benefit, known around town as the RenBen. In 2025, Meriem Bennani was the emcee, and the event was held at a working commercial helicopter facility, where aircraft landed and took off during the event.
Perhaps no one is better at defying expectations than Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. On Wednesday, April 8, in the lead-up to the nineteenth edition of the Expo Chicago art fair, the Renaissance Society held “The Silent Party!” at the Chicago Athletic Club, an 1893 hotel on Michigan Avenue in central Chicago, facing Millennium Park; the grand building, with an elaborate facade and two lavish lobby levels, is patterned after the Doge’s palace in Venice.
The event saw two floors transformed into a labyrinth which visitors were required to explore in silence for a full two hours, communicating only through handwritten notes in provided notebooks. Guests were given necklaces with pieces of curved metal that provided a place for them to rest their wineglasses as they wrote.
What were they talking, or rather scribbling, about? Many things! In the many rooms were numerous performances and installations. Artist Jacob Ryan Renolds offered “Terrible Portraits” done in a “terrible five minutes”; a born performer, the artist drew hilarious renditions. Artist Davide Balula had three performers, clad in black and white, dancing in slow motion, apparently carrying out directives for how to arrange themselves that appeared on a screen, as if in a high-concept version of the old Milton Bradley game Twister. Isabelle Frances McGuire, in a suite, placed a life-size animatronic donkey and, lying in bed, a sculpture of Napoleon Bonaparte. In another suite, a magician performed card and coin tricks, but without the usual patter; my jaw dropped when he made one of four coins disappear from my clenched fist into his own waiting hand. Elsewhere, Justin “Nordic Thunder” Howard, the Air Guitar World Champion, clad in a skimpy leather outfit, silently played along to music on his headphones.
In the final hour of the evening, the silence was broken at a lavish dinner party with a band and excellent food provided by James Beard award–winning Chicago chef Jason Hammel of Lula Cafe, including a tiramisu that measured twelve feet long. In the end, some $600,000 was raised to support the Society.
Six sets of twins helped to staff Maurizio Cattelan’s Renaissance Society benefit.
noah sheldon
Cattelan knows how to go viral. His Comedian (2019), a banana duct-taped to a wall in an arrangement that evoked a hammer and sickle, was the belle of the Art Basel Miami Beach ball that year (and has popped up in the headlines ever since). His functioning solid gold toilet, America (2016), had people lining up to pee like royalty when it went on display at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. His 2011–12 career retrospective, “All,” also at the Guggenheim, left the galleries around the trademark ramp empty, instead turning the empty spiral rotunda into the exhibition space, where he dangled his sculptures in the air; he announced at the time that the show marked his retirement.
William Chyr created a room for Maurizio Cattelan’s 2026 Renaissance Society benefit.
noah sheldon
Cattelan is now reprising two existing works with Avant Arte, which releases artists’ editioned pieces; these revive works that made quite the splash when they debuted. On view at the RenBen was an example of Therapy (2026), an editioned print on a large sheet of paper on which there is 22-karat gold in the shape of a toilet seat, resurrecting America at a more affordable level; proceeds go to the Renaissance Society.
Another new edition is a version of La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour, 1999), which represents Pope John Paul II lying on the ground, having been struck by a meteorite. The piece’s title refers to the moment when Christ on the cross cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In the piece, the Vicar of Christ is felled not by his oppressors but rather by a random cosmic event. Avant Arte is releasing a new version of the piece, priced at $2,851 and in an edition of exactly 666 (which, per Revelations, is the number of the beast).
On the occasion of the RenBen, Cattelan took some questions via email, commenting on how silence can speak louder than words, on what he feels he’s guilty of, and on the enduring myth of originality.
It’s been fourteen years since your self-proclaimed retirement, on the occasion of your Guggenheim retrospective. How is retirement treating you?
It worked well while it lasted. During that time, together with Pierpaolo Ferrari, I developed Toiletpaper, a magazine that expanded into images, objects, and visual traps that moved into everyday life. I’ve been back at work for about seven years now. Not many people return from retirement, but I seem to be one of them and I don’t regret it. Work gives me rhythm, energy, curiosity. I like situations where nothing is given and everything has to be invented again. Retirement is a beautiful idea, but it risks turning you into your own monument. And monuments, sooner or later, stop moving.
You are the artistic director for this year’s RenBen, at which visitors are asked to remain silent for the first two hours of the three-hour party, only communicating through handwritten notes, and featuring some silent performances. Do you think people talk too much at these events, or was there another problem you were trying to solve? What is gained through shutting our traps for a couple of hours?
Silence can be a powerful tool. You see it in history. Mahatma Gandhi understood that saying nothing can carry more weight than any speech. It’s also a way to slow down and look at things with less impulse. In our case, it’s a game, but a precise one. We communicate silently all the time through screens. For two hours, we removed the technology and kept the mechanism: writing, face to face. It changes the quality of the encounter. You leave having met people differently, slower, maybe more honestly… and without the option of pretending you didn’t get the message.
You’re putting out an edition of 666 of your 1999 sculpture La Nona Ora, showing Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite, with Avant Arte, priced at $2,851. John Paul II died just over twenty years ago, and the original piece is twenty-seven years old. Is there something that makes him relevant for you anew in this moment, and how did you and Avant Arte arrive at that very specific price?
La Nona Ora was never really about the Pope as a person, but about an image of power at its most fragile point. Pope John Paul II becomes a figure where authority, faith, and vulnerability collapse into a single moment. Today that image feels even more relevant. Ideologies and beliefs are constantly questioned. What interests me is that tension: a body that collapses, and a faith that doesn’t. The work doesn’t predict anything, it just waits for reality to catch up. The edition changes the image, it makes it circulate, like a rumor. The number 666 sits between faith and superstition. And the price is never just a number. It’s part of the work.
You recently designed the cover of a book about the history of the art market by Valentina Castellani, in which a screw is driven through what looks like a marble rendition of a stretched canvas. How did you think through creating a symbol for the buying and selling of works of art?
I didn’t want to illustrate the market. I wanted to show what happens to art under pressure. A nail usually hangs a canvas; here it almost crucifies it. It’s minimal, but also violent—and from that, an image appears. That felt right. The market doesn’t just sell works, it holds them up, circulates them, and sometimes pins them down. And once something is pinned down, it becomes easier to price. I liked the idea that something so simple could contain all of that.
Valentina Castellani’s book “Trading Beauty” will be available from Gagosian May 1.
Gagosian
You recently announced a project in which people with guilty consciences can call a hotline to confess their sins. What about you? Do you have any sins you would like to get absolved of?
Repetition is probably the most widespread sin. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s comfortable and comfort is persuasive in the art world. I’m guilty of that too. We all are. The system rewards consistency, even when it becomes predictable, so what we call coherence is often just a well-dressed habit.
Marcel Duchamp is the talk of the town on the occasion of a major survey of his work at MoMA. How would you characterize the Frenchman’s influence on you?
I wouldn’t say he’s the talk of the town, he’s more like the background noise of the last century. Marcel Duchamp didn’t just influence artists, he changed the conditions of art itself. After him, every gesture carries a question: is this an object, or is it a decision? That question never really goes away, it just becomes easier to ignore.
Steven Cohen sold an edition of your functioning golden toilet, America (2016), at Sotheby’s in November, and it fetched just $12.1 million on a single bid. The hammer price was only a little above the value of the gold itself. Did that strike you as a successful sale? And how do you think the piece will fit in at its new home, the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum?
I think the life of the work is more interesting than the sale. America started in a museum bathroom, then it was stolen, became a police case, a trial. Now it reappears in an auction and moves again. The price is secondary. What matters is how the work keeps shifting context. It behaves less like an object and more like a narrative. And like any good story, it gets better once it leaves the museum. At Ripley’s, it gains another layer. Not more “pop,” more exposed. It sits between belief and spectacle, which is where it has always been.
Restroom to riches: Cattelan’s golden “America” will hit the block in New York this fall.
Sotheby's.
As you alluded to, the golden toilet also made headlines when it was stolen from Blenheim Palace. Museum heists are all the rage now, from the Louvre on down. Whether the thieves stole it for its artistic value or the value of the gold, what was it like to join the long history, whether glorious or sordid, of art theft?
I’m not sure it’s about theft in the traditional sense. In art, taking something is often closer to desire than to crime. You don’t steal what you don’t want, you steal what you’re drawn to, sometimes even what you want to destroy. There’s a thin line between possession and iconoclasm. Sometimes the impulse is not to own the work, but to absorb it, to get closer to it, as if taking it meant taking a part of what made it. Beyond collecting, it becomes a more extreme, almost cannibalistic form of desire.
Speaking of theft, you’ve talked about how “we should try to change our vision and judge about copying,” and you’ve gone so far as to steal the whole contents of another artist’s show and put it on view as your own, for “Another Fucking Readymade,” in 1996. But a couple of years ago the English artist Anthony James accused you of making works too similar to some of his, in which he fired guns at shiny sheets of metal. Did his accusation spark any new thoughts for you, or do you think he’s caught up in an old concept of authorship? Do you think we all still are caught up in outmoded ideas about originality?
Originality is a comforting myth. It suggests that ideas belong to someone, when in fact they move freely and change shape. What matters is not who did something first, but who makes it necessary again. Authorship is less about ownership and more about where you stand. The rest is mostly a question of timing and sensitivity.
