Sotheby's has announced that an edition of Maurizio Cattelan's gold toilet sculpture "America" (2016) will be auctioned in its The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction on November 18, 2025, with a starting bid of approximately $10 million based on its 101.2-kilogram weight in gold. The work first gained fame at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2009, where over 100,000 visitors used it, and later made headlines when it was stolen from Blenheim Palace in a raid that caused structural damage and flooding. The stolen piece was never recovered and is presumed melted down, making this edition the only one in existence.
The sale matters because it underscores Cattelan's enduring ability to provoke debate about the nature of artistic value, blending Duchampian ready-made tradition with Warholian pop critique and digital-era virality. By tying the artwork's price directly to its gold weight, the auction highlights how Cattelan exposes the mechanisms by which value is socially constructed in the art world—from symbolic to aesthetic to monetary. The work's comparison to Brancusi's "Bird in Space" and Koons's "Bunny" positions it within a lineage of transformative sculpture, while its theft and presumed destruction add a layer of mythic iconicity reminiscent of the Mona Lisa.