He’s got the Midas flush.
Art world troll Maurizio Cattelan took the world by storm after his notorious duct-taped banana sold for over $6 million at Sotheby’s last fall. This year, the Italian prankster will likely turn “crap” into gold when his notorious 18-karat, solid gold toilet goes under the hammer next month.
Carved out of a staggering 223 pounds of gold, the ritzy commode will hit the Gotham auction house’s “The Now and Contemporary” evening sale on November 18, ARTnews reported.
The opening bid will begin at a staggering $10 million according to current prices for the precious metal — but Sotheby’s believes it will fetch more than that, the Wall Street Journal reported.
From November 8, visitors will be able to visit the golden throne, which will be installed in a bathroom at the Breuer Building, Sotheby’s new headquarters.
Visitors are reminded to look but don’t flush, however. While the this blinged-out bowl is actually functional, and users have been invited to relieve themselves in this gaudy potty in the past, there will be no sitting upon the throne this time around.
“We don’t want people sitting on the art,” said Sotheby’s expert David Galperin.
Cattelan originally devised the paradoxical work as a form of social commentary, labeling it “America” to highlight the absurdity of which spots in a museum get deemed sacred versus profane.
He said that he wanted to put something priceless in the “the least noble and most necessary place,” thereby bridging the gap between high form and base function.
The first iteration of the golden toilet was installed in New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016, where it made a major splash with critics comparing the exorbitant John to Dada visionary Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 porcelain urinal, “Fountain.”
Meanwhile, a whopping 100,000 visitors lined up to see—and use—Cattelan’s commode. Among the visitors were former Post contributor Chris Perez, who described the experience as “one of the smoothest, most luxurious feelings I have ever experienced in my life.”
“Watching the water swirl back down the gilded bowl was hands down, the most satisfying part of the whole experience,” Perez gushed.
The gilded sculpture received further acclaim after it went on display at the UK’s Blenheim Palace, where it was installed in Winston Churchill’s wood-paneled bathroom. However, in a brazen heist, sledge-hammer wielding thieves broke in and snatched the $6 million opus, causing flooding issues in the historic home.
Three men were eventually convicted for their role in the theft, but this version of the artwork was never recovered.
It’s reportedly been a banner couple of years for Cattelan, whose fruit duct-taped to a wall, “Comedian,” became a pop culture sensation after going for quadruple its $1.5 million high estimate.
The adhesive fruit, of which there have been multiple iterations, has also been credited with renewing interest in an art market on life support.
Since its coming-out party at Miami’s Art Basel back in 2019, Sotheby said the fruit has “single-handedly prompted the world to reconsider how we define art, and the value we seek in it.”
“Maurizio Cattelan’s ‘Comedian’ became one of the most talked-about sensations of the art world,” Sotheby’s David Galperin told The Post, adding that the work “continues to capture the zeitgeist.”

 7 hours ago
                        3
                        7 hours ago
                        3
                     English (US)
                        English (US)