A GOLDEN toilet has sold for a whopping £9million – barely £1.5million more than its worth in gold.
Modern artist Maurizio Cattelan’s 18 carat fully-working bog was sold to the first bidder, said by auction house Sotheby’s to be a major US brand.
Bidding had started at $10m (£7.7m), only just above the value of its 100kg weight in gold, rising to just over $12m after fees were added.
Another lot – painter Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer – became the second most expensive piece ever sold at auction.
The painting sold for $236.4m (£179m) in a 20-minute bidding battle.
The golden toilet – called America – is one of two versions made by Cattelan, who last year sold a banana taped to a wall for $5.2m.
But it is the only example that survives.
It was first exhibited at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016, when more than 100,000 people queued for their turn to use the gilded lav.
A second example was stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019, just days after it went on display.
It has never been recovered, with cops believing the toilet was broken up.
Two men were jailed earlier this year for their part in the daring heist.
A third – the son of caravan king Maurice Sines – was spared prison for helping to fence the stolen gold.
Before Tuesday night’s sale, Sotheby’s head of contemprary art David Galperin called the toilet “among Cattelan’s most iconic and influential works”.
It “perfectly encapsulates the artist’s career-long interest in value, absurdity, and institutional critique,” he added.
Cattelan’s banana artwork, titled “Comedian”, was labelled as game-changing for the contemporary art world.
At an auction last year, the buyer didn’t even get to keep the banana. They were instead granted permission to recreate the “profound” piece.
Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, David Galperin, said: “What Cattelan is really doing is turning a mirror to the contemporary art world and asking questions, provoking thought about how we ascribe value to artworks, what we define as an artwork.
“What you buy when you buy Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ is not the banana itself, but a certificate of authenticity that grants the owner the permission and authority to reproduce this banana and duct tape on their wall as an original artwork by Maurizio Cattelan.
“No important, profound, meaningful artwork of the past 100 years or 200 years, or our history for that matter, did not provoke some kind of discomfort when it was first unveiled.”
It seems, however, that the “Comedian” might be intended as a joke.
Cattelan is often thought of as a “trickster artist” according to Chloé Cooper Jones, an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of the Arts.
She said: “But his work is often at the intersection of the sort of humor and the deeply macabre.
“He’s quite often looking at ways of provoking us, not just for the sake of provocation, but to ask us to look into some of the sort of darkest parts of history and of ourselves.”
Chloé went onto speculate that the bemusing banana is actually a commentary on imperialism and labour exploitation.
She continued: “It would be hard to come up with a better, simple symbol of global trade and all of its exploitations than the banana.
“[It’s] at least a more useful tool or it’s at least an additional sort of place to go in terms of the questions that this work could be asking.
“It’s not that interesting of an idea.”
A banana only costs 16p at your local Tesco.
