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