Italian avant-garde artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “America” toilet is fully functional and identical to the one that gained worldwide fame when it was stolen in a daring robbery from Blenheim Palace in England in 2019.
Sotheby’s, the international auction house, announced in late October that it would auction a solid gold toilet by Italian avant-garde artist Maurizio Cattelan, titled “America,” the AP reported.
It is also a fully functional toilet, identical to the one that gained worldwide fame when it was stolen in a daring robbery from Blenheim Palace in England in 2019. The starting price of the auction on November 18 in New York will be the price of just over 101.2 kilograms of gold used to make it – currently about $ 10 million.
The head of the contemporary art department at Sotheby’s in New York, quoted by the AP, said that Cattelan is “the best provocateur in the art world.” His work “Comic” – a banana taped to a wall, was sold at auction in New York last year for $ 6.2 million.
The artist has said that “America” mocks excessive wealth.
“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same when it comes to the toilet,” he once said. Two versions of “America” were created in 2016. The one that will now be offered for auction has been owned by an unnamed collector since 2017.
The other version was displayed in a bathroom at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016. More than 100,000 visitors lined up to – to put it delicately – interact with the work.
The Guggenheim offered the work to US President Donald Trump during his first term after he asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting from the museum.
Illustrative Photo by Mauricio Santiago: https://www.pexels.com/photo/led-signage-1264453/
