Produced by: Manoj Kumar
A 101-kg, 18-karat gold toilet sells for ₹1.21 crore at Sotheby’s, turning a functional bathroom fixture into the most provocative satire of superwealth this auction season.
Maurizio Cattelan—yes, the artist who taped a banana to a wall—returns to the spotlight as bidders scramble for his newest critique of capitalism masked as a working toilet.
The same golden commode once cheekily offered to President Donald Trump instead of a Van Gogh resurfaces at auction, carrying years of art-world snark and political subtext.
A Gustav Klimt portrait triggers a 20-minute bidding war at Sotheby’s, smashing records at $236 million and overshadowing nearly everything—except, ironically, a toilet.
Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, one of the few pieces to survive wartime fires, reemerges as a pristine relic of a vanished Austrian art lineage.
The Klimt masterpiece comes from the estate of billionaire Leonard A. Lauder, tying the sale to a fading generation of private collectors who shaped global art markets.
Cattelan’s twin golden toilet—stolen from Blenheim Palace, Churchill’s birthplace—remains missing, with investigators suspecting it was melted down in a scheme straight out of a heist film.
Two men were convicted in the audacious loo theft, but authorities still can’t trace the vanished gold, turning the case into one of Britain’s strangest unsolved art crimes.
Sotheby’s stages “America” like a blockbuster prop, using the golden toilet’s notoriety to ignite fresh debates about art as satire, commodity, and spectacle.