\n The artwork was part of the collection of Est\u00e9e Lauder heir Leonard A. Lauder, who died earlier this year. Across the sale, artworks met or exceeded their high estimates, including an Edvard Munch painting at $35.1 million.\n <\/p>\n
\n The sale so far has marked a triumphant night for the top end of the art market, which has been experiencing a slowdown for more than two years.\n <\/p>\n
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\n During the contemporary sales, following the Lauder collection, the most unusual lot of the night \ufeffwill be the 220-pound, 18-karat gold toilet<\/a> by the conceptual artist and enfant terrible Maurizio Cattelan. The opulent sculpture, titled \u201cAmerica,\u201d is a sibling to the infamous version, which was exhibited in the Guggenheim as a working toilet and later stolen from Winston Churchill\u2019s birthplace, Blenheim Palace, and never found. In a first, the starting bid for \u201cAmerica,\u201d which has been in private hands since 2017, was ideated as a moving target according to the current value of its weight in gold; bidders will start from there.\n <\/p>\n \n \ufeffMarquee sales will continue to take place this week, with Sotheby\u2019s hoping to take in more than $1 billion total by the end, based on its high estimates. The pre-sale exhibitions drew crowds to the array of artworks by Kerry James Marshall, Yves Klein, Henri Matisse, Cecily Brown and Jeff Koons \u2014 as well as lines to Cattelan\u2019s toilet, which was installed on the Breuer Building\u2019s fourth floor in a tiny, mirrored bathroom with a look-but-don\u2019t-touch rule. Sotheby\u2019s new HQ, previously home to the Whitney Museum of American Art and later, an outpost for the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s contemporary collection, has signaled a major shift in its public-facing presence, aligning itself just off the city\u2019s famed Museum Mile, where many of its most important institutions reside.\n <\/p>\n ‘That’s a lot of money for a toilet’\n <\/p>\n Six years ago, the art world was shocked when thieves with sledgehammers stole a golden toilet by the artist Maurizio Cattelan. Now, it\u2019s back \u2014 kind of. CNN Style writer Jacqui Palumbo went to see the artwork before it goes on sale at Sotheby’s in New York.<\/p>\n ‘That’s a lot of money for a toilet’<\/p>\n 2:26 <\/p>\n \n The opening comes at a rocky time for the art market, as global sales of arts and antiques fell for a second consecutive year<\/a> in 2024, according to the latest annual Art Market Report by Art Basel and UBS, and several major brick-and-mortar galleries have shuttered or shifted operations. In May, following the springtime marquee sales in New York, The Art Newspaper reported<\/a> that auction houses Sotheby\u2019s, Christie\u2019s and Phillips saw an 8% slump in sales compared to the year prior, with top lots failing to find buyers or being withdrawn ahead of the sale.\n <\/p>\n \n But with the highly successful off-season sale of art collector and patron Pauline Karpidas\u2019 surrealist works<\/a> this summer, as well as reports of mid-market resilience, some analyses have cautiously pointed to a market rebound. Christie\u2019s fared well during its two-part 20th-century sale<\/a> on Monday evening, reaching $690 million with fees \u2014 a substantial increase from 2024 \u2014 led by a $62 million Mark Rothko painting.\n <\/p>\n \n Record-smashing sales of individual artworks exceeding $40 million haven\u2019t been a guarantee this year, but later in the week, Sotheby\u2019s has another rabbit in the hat \u2014 a psychologically haunting painting by Frida Kahlo, \u201cEl sue\u00f1o (La cama),\u201d which could break Georgia O\u2019Keeffe\u2019s record for the most expensive artwork publicly sold by a female artist.\n <\/p>\n \n This article will be updated as the sale continues.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does a notorious gold toilet and a nearly destroyed Klimt painting have in common? They christened Sotheby\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-300169","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300169\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Maurizio](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/sotheby-s-maurizio-cattelan-america-gallery.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"thumb](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/thumb-2-20251112155246716.jpg\")
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