The consignor of one of the most buzzed about auction lots this season has been revealed. Top 200 Collector Steven A. Cohen is the current owner Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet, America (2016), according to a report in the New York Times. The work is set to hit the block at Sotheby’s on November 18.
Per the catalog entry, the soon-to-be-auctioned sculpture, made of 18-karat gold and weighing over 100 kilograms, was purchased by the owner from Marian Goodman Gallery in 2017. The work will be including in the house’s “The Now and Contemporary,” and the starting bid will be determined by the price of the work’s weight in gold. That’s expected to be around $10 million.
Sotheby’s declined to comment when ARTnews asked if Cohen was indeed the consigner, but the house confirmed to ARTnews that it does not carry an irrevocable bid ahead of the sale.
Before it hits the auction block, America will be installed in a bathroom in the Breuer Building, Sotheby’s new headquarters, and visitors will be invited to view it one-by-one beginning Saturday. Despite it being a fully functioning toilet, and the fact that museum-goers have previously been free to relieve themselves via the artwork, it will be strictly “out of order” this time around.
The work is technically part of an edition of three plus two artist proofs, though only two of those have been fabricated, both of which were made in 2016. America has an interesting backstory: one of the two versions Cattelan created in 2016 was first displayed at the Guggenheim Museum the year it was made. Then, in 2017, when the Trump White House asked the museum to borrow a van Gogh painting, its then artistic director Nancy Spector countered by saying the institution would be willing to loan America instead. (The White House did not take the museum up on the offer.) The Guggenheim’s version was then loaned England’s Blenheim Palace in 2019, where it was stolen and never recovered, making Cohen’s the only extant version.
Cohen is the chairman and CEO of Point72, the asset management firm he founded. He and his wife, Alexandra, have amassed one of the world’s most important art collections, reportedly spending more than $1 billion on it since 2000. It includes significant works by blue-chip artists like Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Jackson Pollock, and Damien Hirst, among many others. The sum they’ve reportedly spent is but a drop in the bucket for the hedge fund manager, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be $23 billion as of November 7.
Cohen previously told Fortune that when it comes to collecting, “I am purely from the gut, and I know right away. If it stays in my brain—let’s say I go see a picture, if I keep thinking about it, I know it’s something I like. If I forget about it, then I know, couldn’t care less.”
Cohen is also a frequent buyer at auctions; in 2015, he was revealed to be the buyer of Alberto Giacometti’s L’Homme au doigt (1947), which sold for $141.3 million, making it the most expensive sculpture ever sold at auction. The Cohens have also given millions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Guggenheim Museum, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the Museum of Modern Art, to which they donated $50 million in 2017 toward its expansion.
Italian conceptual prankster Cattelan also made the headlines during last fall’s auction in New York, when his banana duct-taped to a wall, Comedian (2019), sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s. Crypto billionaire Justin Sun was the buyer, and he later ate the fruit in a publicly stunt in Hong Kong.
Earlier this week, ARTnews revealed the consignors to several works that are being sold at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, including in the former’s “The Now and Contemporary” sale.
