Works of plumbing art have already been stolen.
A golden toilet created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan will be auctioned at Sotheby's in November. The starting price for the lot, which weighs about 101 kg, will be $10,000,000.
The auction house Sotheby's will put up for auction a golden toilet created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. This was reported by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
According to WSJ, Sotheby's expects the final price of the lot to be higher. Cattelan's fully functioning toilet will be auctioned on November 18.
In a comment to WSJ, Sotheby’s representative David Galperin stated that before the sale, the golden toilet will be installed at the auction house's headquarters in Manhattan. Potential buyers will be allowed to view it on site, but they will not be permitted to use it, the publication notes. "We don’t want people sitting on this artwork," Galperin said.
Initially, Cattelan planned to create five identical versions of the piece to, as WSJ writes, raise the question of which spaces in a museum are considered sacred and which are secular. The first piece was installed in the bathroom of the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016. Three years later, the museum sent the toilet to Blenheim Palace in England, where it was installed in Winston Churchill's bathroom. In 2019, thieves stole the work — Cattelan's piece has never been found. The toilet that will be auctioned at Sotheby's is the second version of the artist's work. It belongs to a private collector who purchased it in 2017.
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