Flush with cash? A solid gold toilet is up for auction

NEW YORK (AP) – Art collectors have a chance Tuesday to buy one of the world’s most lucrative latrines: a solid gold, fully functional toilet.

The piece, by Maurizio Cattelan – the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall – goes up for auction Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s in New York. The starting bid will be the market value of the 101-kilogram (223-pound), 18-karat-gold work, currently about $10 million.

Cattelan has said the piece, titled “America, ” satirizes superwealth.

“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he once said. Sotheby’s, for its part, calls the commode an “incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value.”

Owned by an unnamed collector, it’s one of two such toilets that Cattelan created in 2016.

The other one was displayed in 2016 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, which pointedly offered to lend it to U.S. President Donald Trump when he asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting. Then the piece was stolen while on display in England at Blenheim Palace, the country manor where Winston Churchill was born.

Two men were convicted in the toilet heist, but it’s unclear what they did with the loo. Investigators aren’t privy to its whereabouts but believe it probably was broken up and melted down.

“America” was exhibited at Sotheby’s New York headquarters in the weeks leading up to the auction.