A Gustav Klimt portrait painting has sold for a record $236 million at an auction where a solid gold toilet also sold for $12.1 million.
A Gustav Klimt portrait painting sold Tuesday for $236 million, a record for a modern art piece, at an auction where a solid gold, fully functional toilet satirizing the ultrarich also fetched $12.1 million.
The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — went up for auction Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s in New York. The starting bid for the 223-pound, 18-karat-gold work was about $10 million.
Cattelan has said the piece, titled “America”, satirizes superwealth.
“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $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.
