A Gustav Klimt portrait painting sold on Tuesday for US$236 million, a record for a modern art piece, at an auction where a solid gold, fully functional toilet satirising the ultrarich also fetched US$12.1 million.
The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan – the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall – went up for auction on Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s in New York. The starting bid for the 101kg, 18-karat gold work was about US$10 million.
Cattelan has said the piece, titled America, satirises superwealth.
“Whatever you eat, a US$200 lunch or a US$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”.
Gustav Klimt’s ‘Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer’. Photo: Sotheby’s via AP
Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer sold earlier in the night after a 20-minute bidding war, also becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold by Sotheby’s worldwide.