A solid gold toilet is up for auction with a $10 million starting price
[November 01, 2025]
By JILL LAWLESS
LONDON (AP) — For sale: The world’s most valuable toilet, a lavatory
literally worth its weight in gold.
Sotheby’s announced Friday that it will auction off the solid gold
cistern, a sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan entitled
“America.”
The auction house calls it an “incisive commentary on the collision of
artistic production and commodity value.” It’s also a fully functional
toilet, identical to one that gained global fame when it was stolen in
an audacious heist from England’s Blenheim Palace in 2019.
The starting price at the Nov. 18 auction in New York will be the price
of the just over 101.2 kilograms (223 pounds) of gold used to make it –
currently about $10 million.
David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in New York, said
Cattelan is “the consummate art world provocateur.”
He’s also one of most successful, an artist whose work “Comedian,” a
banana duct-taped to a wall, sold at a New York auction last year for
$6.2 million. “Him” – Cattelan’s unsettling sculpture of a kneeling
Adolf Hitler – sold for $17.2 million at a Christie’s auction in 2016.
The artist has said “America” satirizes excessive wealth.
“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the
same, toilet-wise,” he once said.
Two versions of “America” were created in 2016. The one being sold has
been owned by an unnamed collector since 2017.
The other version went on display in a bathroom at the Guggenheim Museum
in New York in 2016. More than 100,000 visitors queued up to – to put it
delicately – interact with the work.
The Guggenheim offered the work to U.S. President Donald Trump during
his first term in office after he had asked to borrow a Van Gogh
painting.
In 2019 it went on show at Blenheim Palace, the English country manor
that was the birthplace of Winston Churchill. Within days it had been
stolen by burglars who broke into the building, forcibly wrenched it
from the plumbing, and fled.
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Sotheby’s has announced it will auction a solid gold toilet, a
sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan called “America.” The
auction is set for Nov. 18 in New York. (Sotheby via AP)
 Two men were convicted earlier this
year and jailed. The toilet has never been recovered. Investigators
think it was likely broken up and melted down.
Galperin is unwilling to speculate on how much “America” could sell
for. He notes that Cattelan’s duct-taped banana posed questions
about “how one assigns value to something that has, in essence, no
value aside from its authorship and its conceptual idea.
“‘America’ is in many ways the complete inverse of that. It is a
perfect foil in that this work has a lot of intrinsic value in a way
that most artworks do not,” he said “The question of the proportion
of value between the raw materials and the artistic idea is very on
the table here.”
“America” will go on display at Sotheby’s new New York headquarters,
the Breuer Building, from Nov. 8 until the auction. It will be in a
bathroom, and visitors will be able to see it up close and personal.
At the Guggenheim and Blenheim Palace, the toilet was connected to
the plumbing system and visitors could book a 3-minute appointment
to use it. This time, visitors won'e be able to use it — they can
look, but they can’t flush.
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