Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet America first captured public attention when it was installed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where more than 100,000 visitors lined up to photograph or even use it during the artist’s major 2009 exhibition. The 18-karat solid gold toilet made headlines again when it was stolen in a daring overnight raid from Cattelan’s show at Blenheim Palace—proving, as the Mona Lisa once did, that theft can make a work even more iconic by thrusting it into the public eye. The heist of the high-value object, insured for £4.8 million, caused structural damage and flooding at the UNESCO World Heritage site.
Now Sotheby’s has announced that an edition of Cattelan’s notorious post-Duchamp toilet will hit the rostrum this November, following its preview at the auction house’s new venue in the Breuer Building. Sotheby’s describes this edition as the only one in existence, since the stolen piece was never recovered and is presumed to have been melted down for its 98 kilograms of gold. The starting bid will be pegged to the artwork’s weight in gold, fluctuating with market prices until the hammer falls. Offered in Sotheby’s The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction on November 18, the starting bid as of October 31, 2025, is approximately $10 million, based on its 101.2-kilogram weight.
A contemporary provocateur who has repeatedly shaken the art world, Cattelan builds on Dadaist and Duchampian traditions fused with Warholian pop critique, questioning—both philosophically and theoretically—what defines a work of art.
A century after Duchamp presented a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt” to the Society of Independent Artists, Cattelan once again jolted the art world with his gleaming gold toilet. “When we look back now at Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, it’s clearly a radical symbol: a changing of the guard, a profound art historical moment. However, Cattelan takes that many steps further,” David Galperin, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Art in New York, told Observer. If Duchamp took the toilet out of the ordinary by putting it on a pedestal, signing it and calling it art, he says, Cattelan makes the ordinary extraordinary by rendering it in solid gold and making it fully functional. “There’s an uncanny surrealism here to the imagery, and a return to form from Duchamp’s original gesture, which I believe is really powerful.”
In Sotheby’s lot description, America is compared to the essential precision of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1928) and the reflective allure of Jeff Koons’s Bunny (1986)—transforming the most banal object into one gleaming with new significance and material worth. The work continues Cattelan’s conceptual exploration of artistic production and the mechanisms by which value is ascribed.
Throughout his career, Cattelan has challenged how artistic value is constructed—first symbolic, then aesthetic and finally monetary. By pushing the notion of the ready-made to its limit and elevating the most ordinary or discarded objects, he reveals how art’s value ultimately depends on social consensus among gatekeepers and audiences alike.
Drawing on Arthur Danto’s argument that art is defined not by its physical form but by its “artworld” context—as “autonomous yet socially determined,” as Theodor Adorno also noted—Cattelan’s art thrives within the economy of self-exposure and performativity that defines digital capitalism. His work finds new meaning amid the shifting dynamics of how art circulates and is consumed. Seamlessly navigating both the art market and media virality, as demonstrated by his Comedian (2019)—the banana duct-taped to a wall (edition of three) first presented at Art Basel Miami for $120,000 and later fetching $6.24 million at Sotheby’s last November—Cattelan exposes how social media and prosumer culture have profoundly altered these power structures.
Galperin calls the piece “Cattelan’s tour de force” in the press release. “Holding both a proverbial and literal mirror to the art world, the work confronts the most uncomfortable questions about art, and the belief systems held sacred to the institutions of the market and the museum,” he says, noting how, in his grandest Duchampian gesture, Cattelan unravels a century of art history while reimagining its future—with his signature fearlessness, conceptual acuity and biting humor.
Cattelan’s auction record remains $17,189,000 for Him (2001), a wax and human-hair sculpture of Hitler in a suit sold at Christie’s New York on May 8, 2016. That record, however, may soon be broken. In an era of global uncertainty, gold prices continue to rise, with a 3 percent year-over-year increase in demand in Q3 2025 to 1,313 metric tons—the highest quarterly total on record, according to the World Gold Council. This makes Maurizio Cattelan’s toilet an even more attractive investment: a doubly secure asset that stores value both in the “brand” of one of the most recognizable artists of our time and in the precious material of the work itself. Whatever the final hammer price, one thing is certain: once again, the Italian artist will dominate headlines at this November’s auctions.
