Gold toilet ‘America’ set to fetch north of $15 million at hyped auction

12 hours ago 4

New York: The queue for the toilet goes out of the building, down Madison Avenue, around the corner on 75th Street and into the Upper East Side.

But these people don’t need to use the bathroom. The toilet they’re there to see isn’t connected to the pipes.

Bidding for the toilet will start at the price of gold, which on current value would be a little over $15.5 million.

Rather, it’s a 101-kilogram, 18-carat gold throne that is up for sale at Sotheby’s new auction house, the Breuer building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, formerly home to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The toilet that is the talk of New York is another conceptual artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose 2019 work Comedian – a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall – was sold by Sotheby’s last year for $US6.2 million ($9.6 million).

And the name of this toilet? Why it’s called America, of course. Make of that what you will.

When the lavatory goes under the hammer on Tuesday night, New York time (Wednesday AEDT), the starting bid will be the current price of gold, which Sotheby’s is tracking in real time on its website. At the time of writing, that means bidding will begin at just over $US10.2 million ($15.6 million).

The queue outside Sotheby’s new auction house, the Breuer building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

If the work seems familiar, that is because this is the second known fabrication of Cattelan’s America. The first was installed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016, where it was connected to the plumbing and visitors were welcome to use it.

In 2017, when the first Trump White House requested a loan of a Vincent van Gogh painting, Landscape with Snow, from the Guggenheim, curator Nancy Spector famously offered the president the gold toilet instead.

That toilet was later loaned to Blenheim Palace in the United Kingdom, where it was stolen in 2019. Two men were found guilty of the heist earlier this year, but the artwork itself was never found. It is assumed the thieves melted it down for sale.

While the toilet may seem like a meditation on Donald Trump – and certainly wouldn’t look out of place in his gold-trimmed White House – Sotheby’s head of contemporary marquee auctions, Lucius Elliott, sees it differently.

Lucius Elliott, Sotheby’s head of contemporary marquee auctions, says the toilet is more likely to be a cultural commentary on America than a political one.

“Ultimately, this is a work conceived in 2015 before that presidency, and is more, I think, about a European artist making a cultural commentary on America, rather than a political one,” he says.

“I see it as definitely a nod to the fact that America is the capital of the Western world, the capital of the capitalist world, and there is nothing more obscene, in a way, than a gold toilet.”

It is also, inevitably, eliciting commentary on the art world. Where Comedian took two items of no value – a banana and a piece of duct tape – and sold for nearly $10 million, the gold toilet does the opposite.

“You look around this building, there are plenty of things that are actually worth more than this – or at least more than our estimate for this – but none of them have inherent material value,” Elliott says. “So, that is the complicating question of what Cattelan is doing here. It’s the complete inversion of the Comedian.”

While Sotheby’s has not confirmed the vendor, US media has identified him as financier Steve Cohen, one of the wealthiest men in America, who also owns the New York Mets baseball team.

In the gallery, the toilet has its own room – a janitor’s closet that has been transformed into a mock bathroom, replete with sink and wall-to-wall mirrors. Visitors must line up again to get into the closet, and are allowed in two at a time. A chatty security guard makes sure nobody tries to sit on, or use, the throne.

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer is expected to fetch about $US150 million.

The auction will be the first at Sotheby’s new home in the Breuer, which opened only last weekend. Previously, the building was home to the Whitney, before being occupied by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Frick Collection.

It is shaping up as one of Sotheby’s biggest auction seasons on record, with a combined estimate of between $US875 million and $US1.175 billion. The centrepiece is a 55-work collection owned by the late Leonard Lauder, the Estée Lauder cosmetics heir and chief executive, philanthropist and collector (he died in June).

All eyes will be on the Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, a World War I-era painting by Austrian Gustav Klimt. It is expected to fetch more than $US150 million and would become one of the five or six most expensive artworks ever sold at auction.

Altogether, a trio of Klimt paintings, including Lederer, is expected to net north of $US300 million.

Also in the Lauder collection are six sculptures by Henri Matisse, a work by van Gogh, and Norwegian painter Edvard Munch’s Midsummer Night, with a high estimate of $US30 million.

Separately, a collection owned by Cindy and Jay Pritzker of the Hyatt hotel dynasty features van Gogh’s Romans parisiens, a still-life painting with a pile of books, described as an “intellectual self-portrait”. Painted in Paris in 1887, its estimated value is about $US40 million.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.