Maurizio Cattelan

The toilet that out-earned the banana

On November 18, 2025, the most expensive artwork Maurizio Cattelan ever made found a buyer: a fully functional toilet cast from 101 kilograms of solid 18-karat gold sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $12.1 million including fees, off a starting bid of around $10 million (The Daily Star (carrying Associated Press)). The toilet, titled America, quietly out-earned Comedian — the duct-taped banana that sold for $6.2 million a year earlier — and it did so the same evening a Gustav Klimt portrait set an all-time Sotheby’s record at $236 million (The Daily Star (carrying Associated Press)).

Cattelan’s own description of the piece reads like a prophecy of that night: “Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he has said of America, calling it a commentary on superwealth (The Daily Star (carrying Associated Press)). Sotheby’s framed it as “an incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value” (The Daily Star (carrying Associated Press)).

The buyer paid for a sculpture with a criminal record. Cattelan made two versions of America in 2016. One was installed at the Guggenheim; the other went to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire in 2019, where thieves ripped it from its plumbing and fled within five minutes, days after the exhibition opened (The Observer). Members of the gang were convicted in 2025, but the original has never been recovered and is believed to have been melted down for its gold (The Daily Star (carrying Associated Press)). The edition that sold in 2025 was the last surviving one.

From Padua to the prankster’s playbook

Cattelan was 64 in February 2025, which places his birth in 1960, in Padua, where he grew up as a working-class altar boy; the only art in the family home was religious iconography (The Observer). He never attended university or art school (The Observer). His father drove a lorry, his mother cleaned houses, and she spent long stretches of his childhood in hospital with the lymphatic cancer that killed her when Cattelan was in his early twenties (The Observer).

At 12 he took his first job selling Catholic imagery at his local church, and committed his first act of iconoclasm by drawing moustaches on statuettes of Saint Anthony (The Observer). He had lost his faith by then — a subject he returned to in 1999 with La Nona Ora, a waxwork of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite — though he insists the work wasn’t an anti-Catholic statement: “The pope is more a way of reminding us that power, whatever power, has an expiration date, just like milk” (The Observer).

The résumé between church and gallery is almost a provocation in itself: caretaker, postman, hospital orderly, morgue assistant, a run of jobs in which he had little interest and could not abide rules (The Observer). In his twenties he started making small pieces of furniture and driving them to Milan to sell to Lucio Zotti, a furniture-shop manager who became his artistic collaborator (The Observer). By his own account there were 15 years of uncelebrated labour before the breakthrough of the 1990s, and imposter syndrome followed him the whole way up: “I always felt like I had imposter syndrome. But as they say, as long as nobody is complaining…” (The Observer).

His early signature move was the prank-as-artwork. For his first solo show in Milan in 1989, he produced nothing at all and locked the gallery door, leaving a small sign: Torno Subito — “Be Right Back” (The Observer). Invited to the 1993 Venice Biennale, he rented his allotted space to an advertising agency that put up a giant Schiaparelli perfume poster, and called the piece Working Is a Bad Job (The Observer). In 1999 he fastened his Milan gallerist Massimo De Carlo to a gallery wall with heavy-duty duct tape — the dealer had to be cut loose when he began struggling to breathe — a stunt he called A Perfect Day (The Observer).

There was always a darker vein running under the jokes. Bidibidobidiboo (1996) showed a stuffed squirrel slumped across a kitchen table, a squirrel-sized handgun on the floor at its feet — a suicide scene built around table and chairs modeled on his childhood home (The Observer). In 2004 he hung three lifelike children in nooses from a tree in a Milan square; a passerby so offended that he got a ladder and cut down two of them, then lost his balance and fell, ending up in hospital with concussion, and the Milan city council debated whether the work was art at all (The Observer). Asked about petty crime from his youth — forging train tickets — Cattelan has said: “Art saved me twice from a miserable life. From a life of slavery and probably from the underworld” (The Observer).

All, the failed retirement, and the comeback

In 2011 the Guggenheim gave Cattelan a retrospective titled All, and he treated it as a career execution: nearly his entire body of work was suspended from the oculus of the museum’s central rotunda, hanging like a giant mobile — life-size waxworks of a praying schoolboy Hitler, the meteorite-struck Pope, JFK barefoot in his coffin, the suicidal gun-toting red squirrel, and Novecento, the elongated dangling horse first shown at Castello di Rivoli in Turin in 1997 (The Art Newspaper). The museum described it as a three-dimensional catalogue raisonné; at the opening, Cattelan announced his retirement (The Art Newspaper).

He meant it, at the time. “I thought it was a final retirement,” he told the Observer in 2025. “At a certain point, they should kill the artist because after that [point], he starts to repeat himself.” He was exhausted by the pressure of inventing something new — and candid about the economics: “You must solve your ego problems to retire, but I didn’t,” he admitted. “That’s why I came back.” There was also a market reason: “The market doesn’t like it when you stop producing. There is no interest to support you and you cannot make money in the secondary market” (The Observer).

Five years later he returned with the work that would become his most traveled. America (2016) was an exact replica of the Guggenheim’s standard restroom toilet, cast in 18-karat solid gold and plumbed into a working public bathroom on the museum’s fifth floor (The Art Newspaper). Over its year on display more than 100,000 visitors waited — sometimes hours — for their turn on it (TheWrap). Cattelan called it “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent,” and it doubled as an homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (The Art Newspaper).

Then came the strangest commission story in recent art history. In the summer of 2017, the Trump White House asked the Guggenheim to lend Van Gogh’s Landscape with Snow to decorate the president’s private living quarters (TheWrap). Chief curator Nancy Spector replied in a September 15, 2017 email that the painting was prohibited from traveling — and offered, instead, to install the very-used solid gold toilet in the White House on a long-term loan (TheWrap). The loan offer came from Cattelan himself: “We would be pleased to help facilitate this loan for the artist should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House,” the email read, noting the piece was “extremely valuable and somewhat fragile” (TheWrap). The White House did not take it up.

The Blenheim heist

In September 2019 America went to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire as the centerpiece of Victory Is Not an Option, Cattelan’s first solo show in Britain in more than 20 years (The Art Newspaper). Days after the exhibition opened, a gang broke in during the night and, within five minutes, liberated the loo from its plumbing and moorings and drove off with it (The Observer). Police believe it was taken to several locations, melted down, and sold off; members of the gang were later caught, charged, and in 2025 convicted, but the toilet itself has never been recovered (The Observer)(The Daily Star (carrying Associated Press)).

In court it emerged that one of the convicted men, Michael Jones, had availed himself of the lavatory’s facilities on the first day of the exhibition. Asked what it was like, he replied: “Splendid” (The Observer). Cattelan’s reaction to the whole affair was the reaction of a man who had been hoping for exactly this kind of plot twist: “This is what you hope for! Because a mediocre work became a good work. If you don’t produce the narratives yourself, you hope that someone will complete the work” (The Observer). He added that before the opening he had said “it would be nice if sooner or later this work is stolen” — not because it was mediocre, but because “before it had just the scatological side, but now it has a Hollywood side” (The Observer).

The banana and everything after

Three months after the Blenheim raid, Cattelan produced the work that would define him for a new generation. Comedian — a single fresh banana duct-taped to a wall — appeared at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019, presented by the Perrotin gallery (SRN News (carrying Associated Press)). Festivalgoers argued over whether it was a joke or a commentary on art collecting; a performance artist took the banana off the wall and ate it; the gallery withdrew the installation as a health and safety risk (SRN News (carrying Associated Press)). Three editions sold for between $120,000 and $150,000, each with a certificate of authenticity and replacement instructions (SRN News (carrying Associated Press)).

Five years later the second of those editions hit the auction block at Sotheby’s with a pre-sale estimate of $1.5 million (The Observer)(SRN News (carrying Associated Press)). Bidding opened at $800,000 and within minutes climbed past $2 million, $3 million, $4 million, as the auctioneer joked, “Don’t let it slip away,” and, at $5 million: “These are words I’ve never thought I’d say: Five million dollars for a banana” (SRN News (carrying Associated Press)). The hammer fell at $5.2 million; with the buyer’s fees the total was $6.2 million, paid by Justin Sun, the founder of the TRON cryptocurrency platform (SRN News (carrying Associated Press)). Sun bought, in effect, a certificate of authenticity giving him the authority to duct-tape a banana to a wall and call it Comedian (SRN News (carrying Associated Press)).

Sun said the piece “represents a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community,” and promised to eat the banana himself (SRN News (carrying Associated Press)). On November 29, 2024, at a press conference at The Peninsula Hong Kong, he peeled off the duct tape and ate it onstage: “It tastes much better than other bananas. Indeed, quite good,” he said (AP wire reporting via The Daily Star).

Cattelan himself is grateful for the noise. “I would say it’s a work that refreshed my image in the new century,” he said of Comedian. “It will haunt me for ever but also it’s the work that gave me a second chance” (The Observer). He has no relationship with his collectors — once his pieces are bought, “I consider them orphans. They have to fend for themselves” — and his own life stayed spare: “My life hasn’t changed. I still have the same bicycle” (The Observer).

The work continues, and so do the disputes. At Bergamo’s 2025 Thinking Like a Mountain biennial he showed a marble sculpture of a homeless man on a park bench — November, wetting himself through an open fly — and One, a boy in a red top mounted on the shoulders of a century-old Garibaldi statue (The Observer). He also reworked Him as No: the kneeling Hitler with a paper bag over its head, a solution found when Chinese authorities refused permission to show the original — “Fantastic!” the official reportedly replied when Cattelan proposed the bag (The Observer). And in 2024, after he opened a Gagosian New York show of 64 bullet-ridden gold panels, lawyers for the British-American artist Anthony James sent a letter claiming plagiarism of his own Bullet Paintings — a claim Cattelan has met with diplomatic silence, telling one critic the similarities were “uncanny” (The Observer).

What this profile does not claim

This profile states only that Cattelan was born in 1960 — the year triangulated from multiple sources (64 in February 2025, 51 in November 2011, Artprice’s database entry); no fully-read source gives his exact birth date. It does not assert details about L.O.V.E., the marble middle-finger sculpture outside Milan’s stock exchange, because that claim appeared only in search snippets the author never read in full. It makes no claim about the Joe Morford Banana & Orange copyright dispute beyond its existence as an unverified lead — no independently read source confirmed its outcome. It does not name the buyer or consignor of the November 2025 America sale, since those identities were reported only by outlets the author did not read in full; the price, weight, date, and sale history are the AP-verified facts. It does not claim the 2011 “retirement” was ever sincere — only that Cattelan announced it, later called it a failed attempt, and returned with America.