The Golden Throne
A fully working toilet, cast from 103 kilograms of solid gold, once let museumgoers relieve themselves on a punchline about wealth. Then someone decided to flush the joke for real.
In 2016, the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan installed a toilet at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York that looked, at first glance, like any other Kohler fixture in the building. It was not. Cast in several pieces at a foundry in Florence and welded together, the toilet was made of 103 kilograms of 18-karat gold. It was plumbed in and fully functional, placed in a public restroom for visitors to actually use, with a special cleaning routine devised to keep it presentable. The museum said the piece, titled America, was paid for with private funds.
The response was extraordinary. According to the Guggenheim, more than 100,000 people waited in line for the chance to sit on it, and a security guard stood watch outside the door. Cattelan himself declined to explain the work, though he had conceived it before Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The museum drew the connection anyway, writing that the toilet's 'gilded excess' recalled Trump's real-estate ventures. In September 2017, when the White House asked to borrow a Van Gogh painting for its private rooms, curator Nancy Spector offered America instead. There is no record of a reply.
The work has also been read as a descendant of Marcel Duchamp's 1917 Fountain, and critic Calvin Tomkins called it Cattelan's most beautiful piece, praising its blunt, one-to-one relationship with its audience.
In September 2019, America traveled to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, as part of an exhibition of Cattelan's work, and was installed in a lavatory once used by Winston Churchill. A palace representative had said that because America was plumbed in, and potential thieves would be aware of its use — that it was, after all, a toilet — security was not much of an issue.
They stole it anyway. On 14 September 2019, thieves ripped America from its pipes at Blenheim, tearing through a site protected as a UNESCO World Heritage location and causing structural damage and flooding in the process. Cattelan, informed of the theft, remarked, 'I always liked heist movies and finally I'm in one of them.' Blenheim's insurer offered a reward of up to roughly $124,000 for the toilet's return.
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