When Maurizio Cattelan unveiled America in 2016 — a fully functional toilet cast in over 100 kilograms of solid 18-karat gold — the world had no idea how prophetic it would feel. Installed in the restroom of New York’s Guggenheim Museum, it arrived in the same year a gold-plated penthouse became the seat of global power.
A decade later, as Sotheby’s prepares to auction America in its new Breuer Building with a starting bid pegged to the market price of gold — around $10 million and yes, crypto accepted — the work lands like a time capsule of late-capitalist excess. What began as satire now reads like documentary.
Cattelan’s toilet is both mirror and monument — a work that literalises the dream (and delusion) of trickle-down luxury. Visitors at the Guggenheim once queued for hours to sit on it, briefly elevated to the status of oligarchs. It was democratic decadence: everyone got a flush of power. In a country where opulence became ideology, America turned the bathroom into a stage for national self-reflection.
At Blenheim Palace in 2019, the work was stolen — a heist so absurd it seemed scripted by the artist himself. The thieves tore the sculpture from its plumbing and vanished, as if the fantasy of infinite wealth had simply been withdrawn. “Are the thieves the real artists?” Cattelan asked at the time — and it wasn’t entirely a joke.
A century after Duchamp’s Fountain scandalised the art world, Cattelan’s toilet feels like its logical sequel. Duchamp mocked art’s sanctity; Cattelan mocks its sanctimoniousness. His version restores function, but replaces porcelain with gold — a gesture both decadent and devastatingly clear-eyed.
In Trump’s America — and the culture it left behind — America feels less like a provocation than a prophecy. A golden toilet for a golden age that never was, it gleams with the contradictions of power, privilege, and performance.
It’s an icon for a country still staring at its own reflection — and still, somehow, admiring the view.
About the artist
Maurizio Cattelan was born in 1960 in Padua, Italy, and is today one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation. A self-taught artist, he worked as a furniture maker before launching his art career in 1989. Much of Cattelan’s early work takes aim at the personalities and conventions of the art world, establishing him as a conceptual enfant terrible. In the mid-1990s, he became known for his use of taxidermy, a vehicle for his macabre sense of humor: in his 1996 work Bidibidobidiboo, a squirrel slumps over a kitchen table with a revolver at its feet, an apparent suicide. By the end of the decade, Cattelan had turned his focus to life-sized hyperrealistic wax effigies, the most famous of which, La Nona Ora (1999), depicts Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteor.
Cattelan has made history at Sotheby’s before. In November 2024, his work Comedian – a banana fastened to a wall with duct tape – soared beyond its estimate of $1-1.5 million, to sell for $6.2 million. First unveiled at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, Comedian drew huge crowds and sparked global debate on notions of value, authorship, the role of the artist and the meaning of art. America stands as its perfect foil – a work of sheer intrinsic material value that continues Cattelan’s profound conceptual exploration of the bounds of artistic production, and of how we ascribe value.
The artist’s auction record was set in 2016 when Him sold for $17.2 million.
