Solid gold toilet snapped up for US$12.1 million at New York auction

A Gustav Klimt portrait painting sold on Tuesday for US$236 million, a record for a modern art piece, at an auction where a solid gold, fully functional toilet satirising the ultrarich also fetched US$12.1 million.

The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan – the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall – went up for auction on Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s in New York. The starting bid for the 101kg, 18-karat gold work was about US$10 million.

Cattelan has said the piece, titled America, satirises superwealth.

“Whatever you eat, a US$200 lunch or a US$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”.

Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold earlier in the night after a 20-minute bidding war, also becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold by Sotheby’s worldwide.