Maurizio Cattelan stole the show at last year’s fall marquee auctions in New York with his banana duct-taped to a wall that sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s. During this November’s fall sales, the Italian conceptual prankser is likely to make a bigger splash, after Sotheby’s announced that it is selling his infamous 16-karat, solid gold toilet.
Titled America (2016), it will be plumbed into a bathroom in the Breuer Building, Sotheby’s new HQ, and visitors will be invited to view it one-by-one from November 8. Despite it being a fully functioning toilet, and the fact that museum-goers have previously been free to relieve themselves in the artwork, there will be a ban on the can this time around.
And in an auction first, when the 100-kilogram toilet hits the block at the house’s The Now and Contemporary evening sale on November 18, the starting bid will be determined by the price of the work’s weight in gold. This is expected to be around $10 million. “Cattelan’s incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value has never felt more timely,” Sotheby’s said in a statement.
Sotheby’s confirmed to ARTnews that no bidders have dropped a big deposit to secure the work with an irrevocable bid before the sale.
America made its exhibition debut at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016. Then, visitors were encouraged to use the toilet as they would any other. More than 100,000 people lined up to create their own masterpiece in what the museum dubbed “unprecedented intimacy with a work of art.”
Three years later, the golden sculpture’s notoriety reached new heights when it was exhibited in the UK at Blenheim Palace, the 18th-century stately home and UNESCO world heritage site that’s the former home of Winston Churchill. In an audacious smash-and-grab (à la Louvre jewel heist), thieves stole the plumbed-in golden toilet. That particular version, which was valued at $6 million, has never been recovered. Police believe it was broken into pieces and dumped. Three British men were eventually flushed out by the authorities and convicted for their role in the theft.
America is an edition of three plus two artist proofs. Sotheby’s version was made in 2016 and was acquired by the present owner in 2017 from Marian Goodman Gallery.
“America is among Cattelan’s most iconic and influential works,” David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, told ARTnews. “This work marked his return to art-making after a five-year hiatus, following the announcement of his retirement on the occasion of his Guggenheim retrospective. It perfectly encapsulates the ideas and conceptual currents that Cattelan has pursued over the course of his decades-long career, taking a piercing look at the systems that shape the art world and our broader cultural landscape.”
There are unmistakable parallels between Cattelan’s toilet and Marcel Duchamp’s iconic, ready-made urinal artwork, titled Fountain (1917). Galperin said America is “almost impossible to explain without referencing Duchamp’s fountain.”
“Cattelan revisits the original provocation of Duchamp’s gesture, but turns it further on its head,” he told ARTnews. “Whereas Duchamp took a readymade object and elevated it to the status of art through contextualizing it as an artwork, Cattelan re-creates the readymade entirely, fashioning an exact functioning replica out of gold. And rather than putting it on a pedestal in a gallery, Cattelan enters the museum through the most unexpected of contexts. However, Cattelan’s arsenal of art historical influence is not limited to Duchamp; his work is just as much in dialogue with Jeff Koons’ Bunny, in the way in which Koons impossibly rendered every seam and pucker of the inflatable Bunny in stainless steel, also bringing something so banal into the world of a reverential thing of beauty.”
Last year, after Sotheby’s announced that it would accept cryptocurrency for Cattelan’s banana duct-taped to a wall, it was bought by Chinese-born crypto billionaire, Justin Sun. Crypto-enthusiast collectors Ryan Zurrer and Cozomo de’ Medici (a pseudonym) also chased the lot. Sotbeby’s will again be accepting crypto for America so I asked Galperin if he was expecting interest from the same crowd.
“We expect America to resonate just as much with seasoned, established collectors of contemporary art, as new ones, that includes those collectors who are active in the crypto community,” he said.
One thing is certain: whoever buys America next month will end up sitting on an absolute fortune.
