These toilets have perhaps the most incredible story of the decade. Created by Maurizio Cattelan in 2016, exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York – and used by 100,000 people until summer 2017 – they are now a private affair. Sold at auction by Sotheby's for $12.1 million (just under 10.5 million euros), America (the work's name) was stolen six years ago by four men, two of whom were charged last May. While the stolen piece has never been found, a completely different specimen has just been acquired at a very high price – literally – by a new owner.
Cattelan or the art of controversy
Maurizio Cattelan likes to stir up controversy. After a thousand and one scandals on the art market, including a simple banana, estimated at several million dollars and eaten by a businessman, this toilet story would seem almost banal. Born in Padua in 1960, Maurizio Cattelan has placed satire at the heart of his practice right from the start of his career, using taxidermy to exhibit dead animals in museum halls (horse, dog or squirrel), or life-size wax statues, such as that of Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite in 1999.
America, the ultimate provocation
Before his famous Comedian banana, presented in 2019 and eaten several times since, Maurizio Cattelan had also created a solid gold toilet a few years earlier. Perfectly functional, this 18-carat structure (over 100 kilos of gold, or several million euros) was the subject of a participatory exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2016, during which visitors were invited to use the work. America brought together some 100,000 people to observe and experiment with it over the course of a few months. In 2019, the exhibition was exported to Blenheim Palace, in the south of the UK, in a toilet once used by Winston Churchill (born in the building). In September of the same year, four men stole the work, damaging part of the UNESCO-listed museum by creating a flood after ripping it out. “I've always loved heist films, and now I'm one of them”, Maurizio Cattelan is reported to have said at the time, armed with his unfailing cynicism. The thieves were found and sentenced to prison between 2024 and 2025. As the copy of the work was never found, the authorities assume that it was melted down in the meantime.
A denunciation of the Trump era to be read between the lines?
“Nothing is more absurd, and nothing is more decadent than a gold toilet,” expressed the head of contemporary art sales at Sotheby's New York after the recent sale of the latest example for $12.1 million. Maurizio Cattelan had, in fact, once again made headlines by presenting this shock work in 2016 at the Guggenheim, whose curators drew a link between the sculpture's meaning, its name and the presidency of Donald Trump. “The aesthetics of this 'throne' are irresistibly reminiscent of the gilded excesses of Trump's real estate projects and private residences,” reported the Guardian at the time - an interpretation that the artist did not confirm himself, but did not refute either.
An exceptional sale (but no record)
Sotheby's had set the starting price at $10 million, a sum far exceeded by the final buyer, who can now boast not only a precious work of art, but also several gold bars in his bathroom cabinet. A priori anonymous, this mysterious buyer thus takes the place of Steve Cohen, its former owner, an American billionaire and collector; without, however, breaking Cattelan's auction record, held to date by the buyer of his kneeling Hitler statue, sold for $17.1 million in 2016 at Christie's.
