Maurizio Cattelan's iconic 2016 gold toilet sculpture, 'America,' will be auctioned at Sotheby's on November 18, 2025, during The Now and Contemporary evening auction. The starting bid will be tied to the fluctuating gold market price, currently around $10 million based on its 101.2 kg weight, and Sotheby's will accept cryptocurrency as payment. The work, a fully functional toilet made of 18-karat gold, was famously installed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016, where over 100,000 visitors used it, and was later stolen from Blenheim Palace in 2019. This is the only surviving version of the two originally made.
This auction matters because it directly confronts the art world's fundamental question of how to value art, blending subjective artistic worth with objective gold value. Cattelan's subversive humor challenges market and institutional systems, making 'America' a cultural phenomenon that critiques the very structures that now sell it. The sale also marks a historic moment as the work will be displayed in the Breuer Building, Sotheby's new New York headquarters, linking the auction to the auction house's own institutional evolution.