How much would you pay for an infamous gold toilet?

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — It might be the most famous — or infamous — toilet in the world: the 220-pound, 18-karat solid gold throne by the artist Maurizio Cattelan, which drew some 100,000 visitors when it first exhibited in the bathroom of New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016.

Three years later, thieves, armed with sledgehammers, stole it in an audacious five-minute heist from Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill’s historic birthplace in the English countryside. Though the perpetrators were convicted earlier this year, the fully functional, opulent toilet, titled “America,” was never found, believed to be cut up or melted down for the value of the gold itself, worth millions.

But that isn’t the end of the saga for the satirical sculpture, which was once offered to President Donald J. Trump during his first term, in lieu of a Van Gogh painting requested by his administration (the counteroffer was reportedly ignored).

Cattelan has previously stated he had made more than one edition of “America,” and now a second edition is making an unexpected, flashy debut on the art market next month.

Sotheby’s in New York will sell the work, which has been in private (and anonymous) hands since 2017, on November 18. That also means the sculpture will be back on public view for a limited time, when the auction house installs it in the fourth-floor bathroom of its brand-new headquarters for 10 days leading up to the sale. This time, however, visitors will not be able to use it, per Sotheby’s. Officially that’s for security reasons, though one can guess why else.

“The door will remain open,” said David Galperin, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, laughing.

Auctions typically have a set starting bid, informed by a number of market factors, as well as low and high sales numbers, estimated ahead of time. But the sale for this “America” will be worth its weight in gold — quite literally — as the starting figure will be its inherent value, fluctuating with the gold market right up until bidding begins. That will be somewhere in the $10 million range, according to the current value (with the price of gold lately setting record highs), plus whatever collectors deem its ascribed value to be.

“The starting bid in accordance with the price of gold was really a way to lean into the very essence of the conceptual basis behind the artwork, which is largely to draw attention to the difference between a work’s artistic value, and a work’s inherent material value,” Galperin explained.

It’s a “perfect foil” to Cattelan’s other equally infamous banana-on-a-wall, “Comedian,” which sold for $6.24 million at Sotheby’s last fall, Galperin added. The duct-taped banana, worthless without Cattelan’s association, first debuted at Art Basel Miami on a bare white wall, originally priced at $120,000. It has been eaten more than once.

“If ‘Comedian’ was all about the intangibility of value and how we ascribe value to works of art, ‘America’ challenges that a step further by being in so many ways, intrinsically valuable, in a manner that so many works of art are not.”

“America” is many things: a wry comment on the art world and the United States, as well as an object of torment for arts publicists and their lofty press statements. (The Guggenheim once described it as an opportunity for “unprecedented intimacy with a work of art.”) And this edition may actually be the only physical one in existence, according to Sotheby’s. Though the work is an edition of three, the auction house does not believe the third has been fabricated.

Beyond the sculpture’s dramatic history, Galperin said “America” is an important 21st-century artwork, one with a direct lineage to landmark Modern art (see: Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 upside-down urinal “Fountain”), but with critical relevance to today.

“Cattelan, for his entire career, has critiqued the system,” Galperin said, “whether it’s the viewers’ experience seeing art in a museum, the way that works of art move through the system, the way that they’re valued, the way that they change hands.

“All of these concepts are things that artworks so rarely confront head on. His ability to do that and do it in such a legible way and impactful way is part of its success here.”

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