{"id":44452,"date":"2025-11-19T04:42:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T04:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/44452\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T04:42:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T04:42:08","slug":"solid-gold-toilet-snapped-up-for-us12-1-million-at-new-york-auction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/44452\/","title":{"rendered":"Solid gold toilet snapped up for US$12.1 million at New York auction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">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.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan &#8211; the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall &#8211; went up for auction on Tuesday evening at Sotheby\u2019s in New York. The starting bid for the 101kg, 18-karat gold work was about US$10 million.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">Cattelan has said the piece, titled America, satirises superwealth.<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">\u201cWhatever you eat, a US$200 lunch or a US$2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,\u201d he once said. Sotheby\u2019s, for its part, calls the commode an \u201cincisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Gustav Klimt\u2019s \u2018Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer\u2019. Photo: Sotheby\u2019s via AP\" data-qa=\"BaseImage-handleRenderImage-StyledImage\" class=\"e1gf69pb2 css-6ikqhs e445x7d0\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1f3f6174-2e2a-435f-b163-ce36f36d50be_7b4b38ec.jpg\" title=\"Gustav Klimt\u2019s \u2018Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer\u2019. Photo: Sotheby\u2019s via AP\"\/>Gustav Klimt\u2019s \u2018Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer\u2019. Photo: Sotheby\u2019s via AP<\/p>\n<p datatype=\"p\" data-qa=\"Component-Component\" class=\"e8zc9q40 css-1c6uqr6 ec74h0k1\">Klimt\u2019s 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\u2019s worldwide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Gustav Klimt portrait painting sold on Tuesday for US$236 million, a record for a modern art piece,&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[7987,25524,25530,153,25525,16325,8583,25526,25527,25529,25513,9,56,63,65,64,25528,13851,11937],"class_list":["post-44452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-america","tag-austrian","tag-blenheim-palace","tag-donald-trump","tag-elisabeth-lederer","tag-england","tag-guggenheim-museum","tag-gustav-klimt","tag-italian","tag-leonard-a-lauder","tag-maurizio-cattelan","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-portrait-of-elisabeth-lederer","tag-sothebys","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}