A solid gold toilet that was made by the same controversial artist who duct-taped a banana to a wall sold for a staggering $12.1 million at a Sotheby’s auction on Tuesday.
The 223-pound toilet, dubbed “America” by its provocative maker Maurizio Cattelan, is entirely made up of 18-karat gold and had a starting bid of $10 million, which matched the current pricing for the precious metal.
The art, which functions just like a regular toilet and was even installed in Sotheby’s New York headquarters for public viewing before the auction, is intended to satirize excessive wealth in the US, Cattelan explained.
“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he once quipped.
Cattelan added that he wanted to put something priceless in “the least noble and most necessary place” to demonstrate the connection between high form and base functionality.
Sotheby’s was less heavy-handed and referred to the porcelain throne as an “incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value.”
Visitors thankfully weren’t permitted to actually use the toilet while it was on display, though users have been invited to christen it previously.
“We don’t want people sitting on the art,” Sotheby’s expert David Galperin said.
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Ahead of the auction, the pricey potty was owned by an unnamed collector. Cattelan originally made two in 2016, and one was briefly displayed at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.
When the Guggenheim Museum was still in possession of the coveted pissoir, it cheekily offered to lend it to President Trump in response to his bizarre request to borrow a Van Gogh painting.
The toilet traveled from New York to England and was featured at the Blenheim Palace, where it was later stolen.
Two men were convicted in the honey bucket heist, but investigators never recovered the gilded toilet.
Authorities eventually concluded that it must’ve been broken up and melted down, similarly to the jewels stolen from the Louvre Museum in late October.
