The $10 Million Throne: Cattelan’s “America” Tests What We’ll Pay To Flush
Maurizio Cattelan’s “America” heads to Sotheby’s with a starting bid pegged to the price of gold — a flushable referendum on value.
A hundred kilos of 18-karat gold, plumbed for action and polished to a mirror: Maurizio Cattelan’s “America” is rolling into Sotheby’s as the season’s most indecent stress test of value. The starting bid isn’t a number so much as a peg — fixed to the sell price of gold at 5:00 p.m. EST on November 18, as quoted by OANDA. The estimate moves with the metal. The symbolism doesn’t budge.
Edition of three, plus two artist’s proofs. One was bolted into a single-stall restroom at the Guggenheim in 2016, where more than 100,000 people queued to do what you do with a toilet — under a guard’s eye, five minutes at a time. Another was installed at Blenheim Palace and ripped from the plumbing in a dawn raid that took minutes and left a flood. Courts finally handed down sentences this summer; the gold is believed to be gone.
This is a market drama wrapped in art history and bathroom humor. Duchamp turned a urinal into a sculpture by declaration. Cattelan turns a sculpture back into a urinal by function — but in solid gold, forcing a head-on collision between intrinsic value and the mood swings of taste. If his duct-taped banana sold on pure concept, “America” counters with mass and metallurgy. Either way, the punchline costs real money.
There’s institutional critique in the plumbing. By hiding the object in a museum bathroom, Cattelan dodged the pedestal, the vitrine, the velvet rope. Instead of reverence at a distance, he offered intimacy behind a lock — “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent,” as he once framed it. Participation wasn’t garnish; it was the work. Then the Blenheim theft turned the sculpture into rumor and residue, a folk tale about greed, waste, and the easiest getaway route in art: melt.
Sotheby’s is betting that shock still sells — and that the market could use a jolt. If price is the language collectors speak, “America” speaks fluently in two dialects at once: bullion and brand. The toilet is a mirror that doesn’t flatter. We see appetite, inequality, and our need to sanctify the ordinary. We also see the most old-fashioned hedge in the room.
How to watch the numbers: the auctioneer will set the opening figure off that 5:00 p.m. EST OANDA print on November 18 at Sotheby’s New York. After that, it’s theater — bidders pushing past the metal’s worth to decide what the joke, and the mirror, are really worth tonight.
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