Home / Arts and Entertainment / Solid Gold Toilet Sculpture Heads to Auction, Valued at $10 Million
Solid Gold Toilet Sculpture Heads to Auction, Valued at $10 Million
1 Nov
Summary
- Sotheby's to auction off solid gold toilet sculpture by artist Maurizio Cattelan
- Sculpture titled "America" is made of over 101.2 kg of gold, valued at $10 million
- Identical to toilet stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019, never recovered
On November 1, 2025, Sotheby's announced that it will be auctioning off a remarkable piece of art - a solid gold toilet sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. The sculpture, titled "America," is made of over 101.2 kilograms (223 pounds) of gold and is valued at approximately $10 million.
This unique artwork is a fully functional toilet that gained global fame when it was stolen in a daring heist from England's Blenheim Palace in 2019. The theft remains unsolved, and the toilet has never been recovered, leading investigators to believe it was likely broken up and melted down.
Sotheby's calls the sculpture "an incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value." Cattelan, known as "the consummate art world provocateur," has created several controversial works that have sold for record-breaking prices, including a banana duct-taped to a wall that fetched $6.2 million in 2019.
The auction for "America" is set to take place on November 18, 2025, in New York. Sotheby's head of contemporary art, David Galperin, notes that the work poses intriguing questions about the value of art and the intrinsic worth of the materials used to create it.
Visitors will have the opportunity to view the sculpture up close at Sotheby's new headquarters in the Breuer Building, but they will not be able to use it as they could at the Guggenheim Museum and Blenheim Palace, where the previous versions were installed.
