At the start of the month, it seemed uncertain whether collectors would be willing to pay $10 million for a toilet, a price based on the material value of Maurizio Cattelan’s solid-gold artwork titled America.
See also: Will Collectors Pay $10 Million for a Toilet?
But on November 19, the piece ended up selling for $12.1 million (with fees) at Sotheby’s New York during The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction. The buyer, however, is not an art collector with a taste for extravagant bathroom fittings, but the US franchise Ripley's Believe It or Not!, known for collecting unusual objects. America, the most expensive purchase in the company’s history, may now appear at its museum in St Augustine, Florida, the franchise’s oldest site, which opened in 1950.
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One of the two versions of America was open for use when it was installed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016 and at Blenheim Palace in England in 2019, where it was later stolen. It is still unclear whether visitors will be able to use Ripley's toilet rather than simply view it.
See also: An 18K Gold Toilet Artwork Was Stolen
Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan often provokes strong reactions with his work. This was the case with his “duct tape banana”, Comedian (2019), and with Him (2001), a three dimensional figure of a kneeling, childlike Hitler, which set the current auction record for a Cattelan piece at $17.2 million in 2016.
