A gold toilet and the most expensive modern artwork ever sold at auction boost the New York market

If the soul weighs 21 grams… what is the value of art? It’s one of those unanswerable questions that resurfaced this Tuesday at an auction house in New York.

It did so because Sotheby’s — which is inaugurating its new headquarters in the brutalist masterpiece by Marcel Breuer that once housed the Whitney Museum — offered its clients America, a toilet made of solid gold by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. It was expected to be one of the highlights of an evening in which a portrait of Elisabeth Lederer painted by Gustav Klimt between 1914 and 1916 sold for a record price of $236.4 million.

The painting, a true rarity, belonged to the spectacular collection of the recently deceased cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder, and has now gone down in history as the most expensive work of modern art ever sold at auction, a record previously held by Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) by Pablo Picasso ($179.4 million). It is also the second most expensive artwork ever sold, behind only Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci ($450 million).

The sale of the Klimt was the defining moment of the first of the two nights dedicated to auctioning the Lauder collection (which totaled $527.5 million), giving a boost to a sluggish market that, amid economic uncertainty, contracted 12% last year.

The starting price of the toilet — $10 million — was the same amount it would cost to purchase a toilet made from that much precious metal, based on today’s market price. So perhaps the value of the art could be calculated by subtracting from the highest bid what anyone would have to pay simply to own such a large and costly quantity of raw material (102.8 kilograms of 18-karat gold).

In the end, the piece sold for a disappointing $12.10 million after a single bid. Thus, the symbolic value of Cattelan’s piece — in reality, the auction house’s fees — could be said to amount to $2.1 million. Cattelan is a familiar figure in the aesthetics of provocation: among other feats, he managed to sell a banana duct-taped to a wall for $125,000 at Art Basel Miami. A version of that idea sold last year for more than $6 million, again at Sotheby’s.

The toilet’s valuation must also take into account the moment the gold market is going through: its price has risen 48% compared to last year, surpassing $4,000 an ounce in October. A surge once again driven by uncertainty in the U.S. economy.

The piece was commissioned by its previous owner when the price per ounce was around $1,200, meaning that even before knowing the final bid, the owner was already set to profit. As is often the case in this business — which thrives on art changing private hands as publicly as possible — the auction house sought to keep the seller’s identity anonymous. Despite this, The New York Times revealed last week that it was investor Steve Cohen, owner of the Jets and a member of two exclusive clubs: the billionaires’ club and the mega-art collectors’ club.

America is a series of three pieces, of which only two have been produced. The first was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016. Its title, and the fact that it was unveiled at the beginning of Donald Trump’s first presidency — a man known for his taste for anything that shines — sparked enormous interest. The museum, located on the same avenue, Fifth Avenue, where Trump Tower stands in Manhattan, even offered the artwork to the president when he requested to borrow a Van Gogh for the White House.

Later, the sculpture was exhibited in London, where it was stolen. Authorities arrested two people, but the piece was never recovered, leading police to conclude that it had been melted down, so the gold could be sold. Evidently, those thieves did not believe in the symbolic value of art. The commission for the one auctioned on Tuesday came afterward.

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