The business of America is business. And you can do your business in a solid gold toilet entitled “America” at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.
The fully functional, 18-karat solid gold toilet was designed by Italian artist Mauirizio Cattelan, a satirical sculptor who is also known for a 1999 room-sized work consisting of a hyper-realistic, full-size wax sculpture of Pope John Paul II in white robes felled by a meteorite that crashed through a skylight.
The toilet is more than just a joke, he told the New York Times. It’s a commentary on excess, and he stressed its “democratic appeal.”
“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hotdog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he told the New Yorker.
But he hopes the viewer will decide what the gilded throne really, really means in the, you know, great scheme of life and stuff.
A uniformed guard stands outside the door to answer questions and to make sure museum-goers who actually use the celestial facility don’t make off with a trip lever worth a few hundred grand.
The toilet is worth between $1.4 million and $2.5 million based strictly on its weight (between 70 and 120 pounds) and the price of gold per ounce (about $1,300 and change), the New Yorkerwrote.
Certain members of the 1 percent have enough money to buy this sort of thing, and they do. The pope thing sold for $886,000 at a 2001 auction held at Christie’s Rockefeller Center.
The Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa, the leaning Tower of Pisa, they will all be there forever. The golden toilet is not guaranteed. Why take the chance?
Go now. To New York, that is.
– Newschannel 6
