Rs 887853500: World’s most expensive toilet is made of solid gold! its designed by…; its name will SHOCK you, it is…

World’s most expensive toilet: ‘America’, no not the country, its name of the world’s most  expensive toilet, which is up for auction in New York at a starting bid of $10 million (over Rs 880 crore).

The cistern, sculpted by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan entitled “America”, is made out of solid gold, and is being auctioned literally worth its weight in gold from November 8. The toilet is made out of 101.2 kilograms (223 pounds) of gold, which currently amounts to about $10 million, the exact starting price for the world’s most valuable lavatory.

Sotheby’s, which is auctioning the piece, describes it as “incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value”.

Notably, the solid gold cistern is a full-functional toilet, identical to the one that garnered global headlines when its was stolen in an audacious heist from England’s Blenheim Palace in 2019, according to the Associated Press (AP).

Why Cattelan named it ‘America’?

Maurizio Cattelan, the famous Italian artist who sculpted the gold toilet, humorously named it “America”,  satirizing excessive wealth. “Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” Cattelan once said.

The sculptor had created two versions of “America” in 2016, the one being auctioned in New York from November 18, which is owned by an unnamed collector since 2017, while the other version was displayed in a bathroom at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016, and attracted over 100,000 visitors.

Guggenheim Museum gifted its piece to US President Donald Trump during his first term, after he had asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting.

However, the Trump version was stolen when it went on display at the Blenheim Palace in England, the birthplace of Winston Churchill. Two burglars who carried out the heist were convicted and jailed earlier this year, but the gold toilet was never recovered. Investigators believe the work was likely broken up and melted down, before being sold.

How much is “America” likely to fetch?

According to David Galperin, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s in New York, its difficult to speculate how much “America” could sell for, noting that while Cattelan’s duct-taped banana– which fetched sold $6.2 million at a New York auction last year– 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 many ways the complete inverse of that. It is a perfect foil in that this work has a lot of intrinsic value in a way that most artworks do not,” he said “The question of the proportion of value between the raw materials and the artistic idea is very on the table here.”

However, its fair to say that the world’s most expensive toilet will at least fetch its price in gold, which is about $10 million, the starting price.

Can visitors use the world’s most expensive toilet?

While the gold cistern at the Guggenheim and Blenheim Palace could be used by visitors after booking a 3-minute appointment, as it was connected to the plumbing system, The one being auctioned at Sotheby’s is not for visitors’ use as it won’t connected to plumbing.

“America” will go on display at Sotheby’s new New York headquarters, the Breuer Building, from Nov. 8 until the auction. It will be in a bathroom, and visitors will be able to see it up close and personal.

(With inputs from agencies)

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