If the soul weighs 21 grams… How much does art really cost? It’s one of those silly unanswered questions that was raised again this Tuesday at an auction house in New York.
Sotheby’s offered the piece to its clients Americaa solid gold toilet by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who was one of the protagonists of an evening in which a portrait of Gustav Klimt was also sold for the record sum of 236.4 million dollars.
The painting, a true rarity, belonged to the spectacular collection of the recently deceased cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder, and has gone down in history as the most expensive work of modern art sold at auction, a mark it has retained to this day Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O), by Pablo Picasso ($179.4 million).
The starting price of the toilet, 10 million, was the same as it would cost to buy a toilet made with that much precious metal, according to its market price today. So the value of the work of art could perhaps derive from subtracting from the highest bid what anyone who wanted to free himself sitting on a golden throne would have to pay to obtain such an expensive raw material (102.8 kilos of 18 karat gold).
Well, the work was sold for 12.10 million dollars, so the symbolic value of the contribution of the artist Cattelan, an old acquaintance of the aesthetics of provocation, who, among other things, managed to sell a banana attached with a sticker to the wall for 125,000 dollars at the Art Basel fair in Miami, could be estimated at 2.1 million. The idea sold last year for more than six million, again at Sotheby’s, in an undoubtedly more profitable artistic gesture.
In bathroom bills, the current situation of the gold market must also be taken into account: its value increased by 48% compared to last year, to exceed 4,000 dollars an ounce in October. A growth spurt caused by the uncertainty of the American economy.
The piece was ordered by its previous owner when the price per ounce was around $1,200. Before knowing what the final bid price would be, the owner had already struck a phenomenal deal. As often happens in this business, which consists of transferring art out of private hands and the more publicly the better, the auction house wanted to keep the seller’s identity anonymous, despite this, The New York Times revealed last week that he is the investor Steve Cohen, a member of two exclusive clubs: that of billionaires and that of mega-art collectors.
America This is a series of three pieces, of which only two were produced. The first was exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York in 2016. Its title (United States, in Spanish) and the fact that it came out at the beginning of the first presidency of Donald Trump, known for his taste for all that glitters, aroused enormous interest. The museum, located on the same Fifth Avenue as Trump’s tower in Manhattan, offered that work of art to the president when he requested a White House loan of van gogh.
The sculpture in question was subsequently exhibited in London, where it was stolen. Authorities arrested two people, but the piece was never recovered, so it appears it was melted down to sell the gold. The order for the one auctioned this Tuesday arrived later. It is clear that those thieves did not believe in the symbolic value of art.
