A solid gold toilet is up for auction with a $10 million starting price

LONDON AP For sale The world s largest part valuable toilet a lavatory literally worth its weight in gold Sotheby s released Friday that it will auction off the solid gold cistern a sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan entitled America The auction house calls it an incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value It s also a fully functional toilet identical to one that gained global fame when it was stolen in an audacious heist from England s Blenheim Palace in The starting price at the Nov auction in New York will be the price of the just over kilograms pounds of gold used to make it right now about million David Galperin head of contemporary art at Sotheby s in New York commented Cattelan is the consummate art world provocateur He s also one of majority of flourishing an artist whose work Comedian a banana duct-taped to a wall sold at a New York auction last year for million Him Cattelan s unsettling sculpture of a kneeling Hitler sold for million at a Christie s auction in The artist has noted America satirizes excessive wealth Whatever you eat a lunch or a hot dog the results are the same toilet-wise he once explained Two versions of America were created in The one being sold has been owned by an unnamed collector since The other version went on display in a bathroom at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in More than visitors queued up to to put it delicately interact with the work The Guggenheim had offered the work to U S President Donald Trump during his first term in office after he had appealed to borrow a Van Gogh painting In it went on show at Blenheim Palace the English country manor that was the birthplace of Winston Churchill Within days it had been stolen by burglars who broke into the building forcibly wrenched it from the plumbing and fled Two men were convicted earlier this year and jailed The toilet has never been recovered Investigators think it was likely broken up and melted down Galperin is unwilling to speculate on how much America could sell for He notes that Cattelan s duct-taped banana posed questions about how one assigns value to something that has in essence no value aside from its authorship and its conceptual idea America is in a large number of tactics the complete inverse of that It is a perfect foil in that this work has a lot of intrinsic value in a way that bulk artworks do not he disclosed The question of the proportion of value between the raw materials and the artistic idea is very on the table here America will go on display at Sotheby s new New York headquarters the Breuer Building from Nov until the auction It will be in a bathroom and visitors will be able to see it up close and personal but not use it At the Guggenheim and Blenheim Palace the toilet was connected to the plumbing system and visitors could book a -minute appointment to use it This time visitors will be not able to use it they can look but they can t flush Source