America, Maurizio Cattelan’s celebrated gold toilet , will go up for auction at Sotheby ’s on Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. for The Now and Contemporary evening auction. The work, from 2016, is a fully functioning toilet made from just over 100 kilograms of solid 18-karat gold, and has become one of the most infamous artworks of the century. This is the first time the work has gone to auction. The base bid will be determined by the gold weight price of the artwork, which will rise or fall according to the gold market up to the auction date. At today’s price, Oct. 31, 2025, it is around $10 million, based on its weight of 101.2 kg. Sotheby’s will also accept cryptocurrency for America’s payment.
America ’s appearance at the auction is intended to address the question that has long preoccupied not only Cattelan but also the art world at large, namely: how do we value art? With his characteristic subversive humor, the genius of Cattelan’s work lies in his questioning of the notion of value. If for centuries art has been questioned for the perceived intangibility of its value, here the artist overturns this critique, creating a work whose subjective value is challenged by its absolute, objective value. In doing so, Cattelan infiltrates the very system of the market and the institutions that have long supported the art world. America became a cultural phenomenon when it was installed in the restroom of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016. Visitors were encouraged to use the restroom like any other, and more than 100,000 people lined up to experience what the museum called “an unprecedented intimacy with a work of art.” Its fame reached new heights in 2019, when it was displayed, and subsequently stolen, at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, the birthplace and ancestral home of Sir Winston Churchill, as well as a UNESCO World Heritage site: the work was on display here. The next chapter in the extraordinary American story will see the work installed in a bathroom of New York’s iconic Breuer Building, which will open in November as the new home of the auction house Sotheby’s, founded 281 years ago. The current work is the only existing version of this sculpture; the only other example to have been made was one that was stolen and never recovered.
"America is Maurizio Cattelan’s tour de force," says David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s New York. “A mirror, both proverbial and literal, of the art world, the work tackles the most uncomfortable questions about art and belief systems held sacred by market and museum institutions. In his grandest Duchampian gesture, Cattelan unveils a century of art history by imagining a new way of thinking: with his characteristic audacity, conceptual brilliance and searing humor.”
America ’s gleaming, shining surface and the sheer opulence of its 100 kilograms of gold create an uncanny surrealism when juxtaposed against the banality of its familiar form. The technical complexity of its fabrication in the most unlikely materials testifies both to Cattelan’s mastery as a sculptor and to his long passion for experimenting with the very limits of imitation. Its formal precision is also reminiscent of Constantin Brancusi’s bronze sculpture Bird in Space (1928) and Jeff Koons’ Bunny (1986). Just as Koons rendered every detail of his inflatable bunny in gleaming reflective stainless steel, Cattelan takes a mundane everyday object and encases it in metallic splendor.
America continues a tradition of artworks that have challenged notions of artistic creation, which began with French artist Marcel Duchamp’s seminal readymade Fountain (1917). A century after Duchamp presented the Society of Independent Artists with a found porcelain urinal signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt” and mounted on a pedestal, Cattelan once again shook the art world with his ingenious toilet. Duchamp insisted on the sacredness of the art object, stripping it of its utility and recontextualizing the readymade on a pedestal to call it art, while Cattelan completely rewrites and subverts this history. The artist from Padova made the toilet out of solid gold and, instead of presenting the work on a pedestal, returns the sculpture to its original purpose. In doing so, he challenges the sanctity of the museum, breaking down the invisible barrier between artwork and viewer, inviting visitors to interact directly with the sculpture. In many ways, America ’s debut at the Guggenheim in 2016 marked Cattelan’s spectacular return to the art world. In 2011, the artist announced his retirement from art-making when Maurizio Cattelan: All, his legendary retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim, in which nearly all of the works he had created up to that point were suspended from the museum’s rotunda, was installed. But true to the spirit of his first conceptual work Torno subito, the artist could not stay away for long. Five years later, he returned to the very place where it all began, installing America in the Guggenheim’s fifth-floor bathroom. In the catalog, curator Nancy Spector wrote, “In a museum environment where visitors are constantly told ’don’t touch,’ this is an extraordinary opportunity to spend time completely alone with a work of art by a major contemporary artist.” A security guard was stationed outside the restroom as more than 100,000 visitors lined up, often for hours, to admire it. “Cattelan’s return to the Guggenheim,” says Lucius Elliott, head of contemporary art sales at Sotheby’s New York, “was not simply a homecoming, it was a conceptual checkmate. At a time when the subjectivity of art’s value was being questioned, Cattelan presents a work whose material value is undeniable. And by presenting it in a bathroom, he takes a medium that denotes wealth and exclusivity and gives it a truly universal function.”
When it was displayed at Blenheim Palace in September 2019, no security measures had been taken. The artwork was installed in a small bathroom just outside the state rooms and near the bedroom where Winston Churchill was born. Then, in the early hours of September 14, five thieves ripped the 18-karat gold lamp from its plumbing and fled with the artwork. The theft captured the attention of the world’s media. Although many initially thought that the artist, known for his subversive humor, might be involved in the robbery, it soon became clear that this was not the case. “I’ve always liked heist movies, and I’m finally in one. Are the thieves in this work the real artists?” said Cattelan at the time. Two men were eventually convicted of the theft in June 2025, but the work was never recovered.
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| Cattelan's famous gold toilet goes up for auction: America for sale at Sotheby's |
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