$12 Million Toilet is a Royal Flush for Ripley’s
A solid-gold toilet sold during Sotheby’s New York Sales, and you might not believe who bought it.
Contemporary artist Maurizio Cattelan is considered one of the great pranksters of the art world, but the value of his work is no laughing matter. At a recent auction at Sotheby’s in New York, the Now & Contemporary Evening Auction that closed November 18, Cattelan’s 2016 sculpture America, a fully-functional toilet made from 101.2 kg of 18-karat gold, sold for $12.1 million. Find that unbelievable? Then it’s appropriate that the buyer was soon revealed to be Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
Ripley’s released a statement on November 19, stating that the meltdown value of the gold is $10 million, which is what Sotheby’s used for the opening bid. According to Artnet News, Ripley’s director of exhibits, John Corcoran, said of the new purchase, “Our number one idea is to keep things free-flowing. Number two is making sure nothing gets clogged up and flushes away future possibilities. We will unroll some paper and start planning.”
Artnet also noted that Ripley’s statement came out on World Toilet Day, appropriately enough. It’s a more serious occasion than it may sound. Established by the World Toilet Organization on November 19, 2001, the purpose was to raise awareness of the importance of safely managed sanitation and the billions of people worldwide who lack access to it. It became an official United Nations Observance in 2013.
America, which creator Cattelan describes as a satirical commentary on commercialism (whether this makes its price ironic or fitting is up to the individual viewer), is the most expensive artwork in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! collections. It joins such artistic oddities as Pat Acton’s massive matchstick sculptures of everything from film props to a locomotive with working controls; a group of 25-foot-long crochet lions by yarn artist Shauna Richardson; and a portrait of the late Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek made of nearly 1,000 miniature Rubik’s Cubes.
The edition of America that Sotheby’s sold is the second of three. Another edition was displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in 2016, where it drew further attention when the museum offered it to the White House. It was later displayed at Blenheim Palace in the United Kingdom, but disappeared after being stolen in 2019.
Cattelan is no stranger to controversy or to high prices. One of his most famous works, called Comedian, consisting of a banana duct taped to a wall, brought him global attention when he introduced it at Art Basel Miami in 2019. Two editions, each consisting of a banana duct taped to a wall, sold there for $120,000. Since then, Comedian has been displayed at museums around the world, been eaten by hungry visitors (which Cattelan insists does not harm the art), and sold at, yes, Sotheby’s in 2024. His provocative art has earned him comparisons to Marcel Duchamp, who also recognized the artistic potential of toilets: in 1917, he shocked, amused, and confounded the art world by exhibiting a signed urinal as a sculpture he called Fountain.
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