In 1913, when Igor Stravinsky premiered his orchestral work The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Parisian audiences were so incensed by the discordant score that a riot broke out. Four years later, New Yorkers were only slightly more genteel toward French artist Marcel Duchamp’s submission of a ready-made upside-down urinal autographed by the fictitious creator “R. Mutt” to the inaugural exhibition of New York’s Society of Independent Artists.
A symphonic paean to pagan energy and a urinal may seem disparate in intention, but both Stravinsky and Duchamp’s works expressed the radicalism of the early 20th-century avant-garde, questioning certainties and upending values — to paraphrase Karl Marx, making all that is solid melt into air. For Duchamp, “Fountain” wasn’t just a provocation, but also a philosophical comment about the nature of art itself: that a prosaic object can be elevated by framing alone. According to critic Margan Falconer in How to be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art (2025), Duchamp was asking, “Why couldn’t art be a seamless, enveloping, immersive environment in which everyone will live and work?” Something as all-consuming, in other words, as hearing nature’s fractured rhythms replicated in a Parisian concert hall or viewing a urinal in a museum.
To paraphrase Marx again, history first begins as tragedy and then ends as farce. From my perspective, there’s nothing tragic in Duchamp’s “Fountain,” but there is absolutely something farcical in Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan’s 2016 “America,” a functional, solid 18-carat gold toilet that led the November 18th Sotheby’s auction “The Now and Contemporary” with a starting bid of $10.2 million. Like “Fountain,” Cattelan’s piece could be used for its intended purpose (Sotheby’s exhibited “America” in a bathroom at the Breuer Building, though visitors weren’t allowed to use it), but otherwise, the similarity is superficial. Duchamp elevated the prosaic, whereas Cattelan simply gilded the familiar — part of the point of viewing “Fountain” is precisely that it’s a urinal like any other, while few of us have encountered a golden toilet. Duchamp’s work maintains that anyone’s bathroom could be a museum, whereas Cattelan’s rejects that claim. There is a potent allegory in the descent from Duchamp to Cattelan; it tells us much about the vagaries of art and finance and the final abolition of a genuine avant-garde.
Alfred Stieglitz, photo of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” (1917), silver gelatin print photography (photo via Wikimedia Commons)
“America” was consigned to Sotheby’s by hedge fund manager and owner of the New York Mets, Steve Cohen; the piece ultimately sold for $12.1 million (including fees) to the entertainment company Ripley’s Believe It or Not!. Cohen is the 30th-richest man in the United States and possesses an art collection valued at a billion dollars, including pieces by Jackson Pollock, Jeff Koons, and Willem de Kooning. Having previously been charged with racketeering and insider trading, Cohen also rather predictably donated a million dollars to the inauguration of Donald Trump, a figure who frequently identified with the concept of a golden toilet in jokes. One wonders what Cohen did with the piece. Did he admire the sheen of yellow that reflected off the sculpture? Did he appreciate the return on his initial investment after buying it for an undisclosed sum in 2017? Did Steve Cohen shit in “America”?
Whereas “Fountain” ruptured our civilization’s imagination, Cattelan’s piece has all the impact of a wet fart. Duchamp framed the mundane as generative; Cattelan’s work is merely expensive. A work of art that could have just been an email. “America” (get the title …?) confuses the profoundly transgressive with the merely decadent, a gimmick with the cutting-edge — unless, of course, it’s even more cynical than that. Perhaps its sale price is intentionally its most salient feature, because the average Jimmy Kimmel monologue is more acidically satirical than Cattelan’s piece.
A clichéd way of describing the artist’s career is that he’s no stranger to stunts. Most infamously, he was the creator of “Comedian,” the 2019 work consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall at Art Basel in Miami Beach, which sold to the Chinese cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun for the absolute steal of $6.2 million. Yesterday’s auction isn’t even the largest sum ever paid for a Cattelan work — that dubious honor goes to his 2001 “Him,” a child-sized realistic statue of a kneeling Adolf Hitler that went at Sotheby’s for $17.2 million. You’ll notice how many of my sentences end in exorbitant amounts of money; that’s not incidental. The toilet is just a troll, as obvious and uninspired as it is pricey — but there is also something ominous about it. For if there is any story at all to the whole nihilistic affair, it’s the atrophy of American art over the past half-century.
Maurizio Cattelan’s functional, solid-gold toilet at the Guggenheim Museum in 2016 (photo Carey Dunne/Hyperallergic)
A glancing familiarity with art history should avail anyone of their idealism concerning the vocation, for art has always existed within networks of wealth and patronage. Nonetheless, we’ve witnessed a distinct curdling since de Kooning’s “Two Women” (1953) became the first contemporary piece by a living artist to sell for more than a million dollars at auction in 1983. The supply-side, free-market, trickle-down economics of the Reagan epoch signified the final abolition of a genuine avant-garde. That decade “set a stage for the reevaluation of the art object,” as Melissa Chiu writes in the forward to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s exhibition guide Brand New: Art and Commodity in the 1980s (2018). “Material goods were seen as a demonstration of power and financial wealth, while artists were associated with cultural capital.” Obviously, spangled objects have been traded throughout history from the Medicis to the Romanovs, but in the ’80s, a select coterie of savvy artists also became financial speculators. Say what you will about a Fabergé egg, but it’s more interesting than produce stuck to a wall. If there is any “meaning” in “America,” it’s as an object lesson concerning the degradation of the very idea of art as a public good. Today, works by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Klimt are squirrelled away from the curious eyes of the public by Russian oligarchs and Wall Street bankers at the Geneva Freeport so that they can appreciate in value, while Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” (c. 1490–1510) decorates Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s private yacht Serene after he purchased it for nearly half-a-billion dollars at Christie’s. In that context, “America” is just a drop in the bucket, piss in the toilet.
It’s telling that the auction took place in the Breuer Building, the Brutalist structure at 945 Madison Avenue that was home to the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1966 until 2014 and was briefly a satellite campus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection before becoming the new headquarters for Sotheby’s. A seamless conversion of public good into the private spectacle: Where museumgoers once studied works by Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, its clean, white walls now display work to be bid on by billionaires. An avant-garde without a public to shock, without an audience willing to riot, is just masturbation. If Duchamp spoke to the exigencies of modernity, then Cattelan is merely talking about economics. It’s not art — just a more eccentric version of stock trading (or, if suspicions are correct, money laundering).
Earlier this year, Cohen’s friend Trump started cancelling National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants, including money already earmarked for organizations such as the Berkeley Repertory Theater, the Chicago-area arts education nonprofit Open Studio project, and Central Park Summer Stage in New York City. The average NEA grant is around $23,000, with many individual grants that go towards general operating costs being the difference as to whether an arts organization can continue to function or not. Now that Cohen is $12 million richer, he could theoretically fund around 500 different projects — we all await such news with bated breath. While many in the art world superficially espouse a kind of gauzy progressivism, the jaundiced cynicism of pieces like “America” speaks to the often anemic, empty posturing of too much criticism, where such talk justifies the conceptual emptiness of this work and its sundry associations to abject capitalist exploitation. If Cattelan’s piece reminds me of anything, it’s of the golden toilets that Thomas More imagines citizens of the perfect society using in his Renaissance work Utopia (1516). There, gold is so plentiful that the wages of wealth are meaningless. For those able to bid at Sotheby’s, we may reflect that Utopia has always existed, just not for everyone. If there is still room for the avant-garde, it must speak to that — not in a spirit of didacticism, but in solidarity. The only true radical art understands that there is joy in eating the rich, and depositing what’s left over where it belongs.
