NEW YORK, NY.- This November, Sotheby’s will offer Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016): a fully functional toilet fashioned from just over 100 kilograms of solid 18-karat gold, which has become one of the century’s most influential—and infamous—artworks. In an auction first, the starting bid will be determined by the price of the artwork’s weight in gold—rising or falling with the gold market until the hammer falls. Cattelan’s incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value has never felt more timely.

The appearance of America at auction will confront the question that has long preoccupied not only Cattelan but also the art world at large, namely: how do we value art? With his characteristic subversive wit and intellectual precision, the genius of Cattelan’s work lies in his interrogation with the notion of value. If for centuries art has been questioned for the perceived intangibility of its value, here the artist turns that criticism on its head, creating a work whose subjective value is skewered by its absolute, objective worth. In doing so, Cattelan—the consummate provocateur infiltrates the very system of the market and the institutions that have long upheld the art world.

America became a cultural phenomenon when it was installed in the restroom of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016. Visitors were encouraged to use the toilet as they would any other, and more than 100,000 people lined up to experience what the museum dubbed “unprecedented intimacy with a work of art.”

Its fame reached new heights in 2019, when it was exhibited, and subsequently stolen, from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England - the birthplace and ancestral home of Sir Winston Churchill, and a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The next chapter in the remarkable story of America will see the work installed in a bathroom at New York’s iconic Breuer Building, which opens as the new home of the 281-year-old auction house Sotheby’s in November.

The present work is the only extant version of this sculpture; the only other example to have been fabricated was the one stolen and never recovered. Now, it will be offered as part of Sotheby’s The Now and Contemporary Evening Auction at 7pm on November 18. The starting bid at today’s rate, October 31, 2025, stands in the region of $10 million, based on its weight of 101.2kg. Sotheby’s will be accepting crypto for the payment of America.

“America is Maurizio Cattelan’s tour de force. Holding both a proverbial and literal mirror to the art world, the work confronts the most uncomfortable questions about art, and the belief systems held sacred to the institutions of the market and the museum. In his grandest Duchampian gesture, Cattelan unravels a century of art history while imagining a new way of thinking: with his characteristic fearlessness, conceptual genius, and searing humor.” - David Galperin, Head of Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s New York

AMERICA

America’s shimmering, resplendent surface and the sheer opulence of its 100kg of gold creates an uncanny surrealism when juxtaposed with the banality of its familiar form. The technical complexity of its fabrication in the unlikeliest of materials speaks to both Cattelan’s mastery as a sculptor, and his careerlong fascination with testing the very limits of imitation. Its precision of form also calls to mind Constantin Brancusi’s bronze sculpture, Bird in Space (1928) and Jeff Koons’s Bunny (1986). Just as Koons rendered every detail of his iconic inflatable Bunny in gleaming reflective stainless steel, Cattelan takes an everyday banal object and enshrines it in metallic splendor.

America continues a legacy of revolutionary artworks that have challenged notions of artistic creation, one that began with French artist Marcel Duchamp’s seminal readymade Fountain (1917). A century after Duchamp presented a found porcelain urinal, signed with a pseudonym “R. Mutt” and mounted on a pedestal, to the Society of Independent Artists, Cattelan shook the art world once again with his own brilliant toilet. Except if Duchamp insisted on the sanctity of the art object through removing its utility and re-contextualizing the readymade on a pedestal to call it art, Cattelan totally rewrites and subverts this canonical history. With exceptional craftsmanship, Cattelan fashions the toilet out of solid gold—and rather than presenting the work on a pedestal, he returns the sculpture to its original use. In doing so, he defies the sanctity of the museum, breaking down the invisible barrier between artwork and viewer through inviting museumgoers to engage directly with the sculpture.

In many ways, the debut of America at the Guggenheim in 2016 marked Cattelan’s spectacular return to the art world. In 2011, he famously declared his retirement from art-making as the Guggenheim mounted Maurizio Cattelan: All—his legendary retrospective in which nearly every work he had created to that point was suspended from the museum’s rotunda. But, true to the spirit of his early conceptual work Torno Subito (“I’ll be right back!”)*, the artist couldn’t stay away for long.

Five years later, he returned to the very site where it began, installing America in the Guggenheim’s fifthfloor restroom. In the catalogue, curator Nancy Spector wrote: “In a gallery environment where visitors are constantly being told, ‘don’t touch,’ this is an extraordinary opportunity to spend time completely alone with a work of art by a leading contemporary artist.” A security guard was posted outside the bathroom as more than 100,000 visitors queued, often for hours at a time, to experience it.

“Cattelan’s return to the Guggenheim was not simply a homecoming—it was a conceptual checkmate. At a moment where the subjectivity of art’s value was being questioned, Cattelan presents a work whose material value is undeniable. And by presenting that work in a restroom, he takes a medium that denotes wealth and exclusivity and gives it a function that is truly universal.” -- Lucius Elliott, Head of Contemporary Art Marquee Sales, Sotheby’s New York

When it was exhibited at the grand Blenheim Palace in September 2019, no such security measures were in place. America was installed in a small lavatory just off the state rooms and near the bedroom where Winston Churchill was born. Then, in the early hours of September 14, five thieves wrenched the 18-karat fixture free from its pipework and escaped with the artwork. The theft captivated media across the globe. Although many initially thought the artist, known for his subversive humor, might have been in on the heist, it soon became clear this was not the case. “I always liked heist movies and finally I’m in one of them. Are the thieves of this work the real artists?” Cattelan said at the time. Two men were eventually convicted of the theft in June 2025, but the work itself was never recovered.