New York's Guggenheim Museum has a solid-gold, functioning, available-to-the-public-for-the-obvious-purpose toilet, which doubles as a sculpture by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan.
The toilet, worked in solid gold as a copy of a standard Kohler model, is in one of the museum's regular restrooms. Cattelan told the New York Times that he hopes people will not see it as a joke, but as both an absurd sendup of inequality and runaway wealth in the art world, and as a gift to museumgoers. As an artwork, though, it bears the title "America," which begs many questions.
The work also calls to mind Marcel Duchamp's use of a bathroom fixture, in this case a porcelain urinal, as a manifesto of the Dada movement in 1917. Duchamp upended the urinal, labeled it "Fountain" and challenged conceptions of what is art, and what is the role of the artist.
Photos: Top, Kris McKay/Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; bottom, Gary Soup/Flickr
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