Maurizio Cattelan - The Art of the Prank

November 25, 2025

You can’t shine shit

Unless you have a lot of money!

“Maurizio Cattelan Is No Duchamp,” by Ed Simon, Hyperallergic, November 19, 2025.

One elevated the prosaic. The other merely gilded the familiar.

In 1913, when Igor Stravinsky premiered his orchestral work The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Parisian audiences were so incensed by the discordant score that a riot broke out. Four years later, New Yorkers were only slightly more genteel toward French artist Marcel Duchamp’s submission of a ready-made upside-down urinal autographed by the fictitious creator “R. Mutt” to the inaugural exhibition of New York’s Society of Independent Artists.

A symphonic paean to pagan energy and a urinal may seem disparate in intention, but both Stravinsky and Duchamp’s works expressed the radicalism of the early 20th-century avant-garde, questioning certainties and upending values — to paraphrase Karl Marx, making all that is solid melt into air. For Duchamp, “Fountain” wasn’t just a provocation, but also a philosophical comment about the nature of art itself: that a prosaic object can be elevated by framing alone. According to critic Margan Falconer in How to be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art (2025), Duchamp was asking, “Why couldn’t art be a seamless, enveloping, immersive environment in which everyone will live and work?” Read the whole article here.

February 28, 2025

Trying to Polish a Turd

The Golden Throne Heist Trial: A Cattelan Prank Taken to Extremes, News, by Admin, ArteFuse, February 25, 2025

It was a crime of absurdist proportions, a heist worthy of Maurizio Cattelan himself. In the predawn hours of September 14, 2019, a gang of thieves stormed Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, and made off with one of the most famous—and most satirical—works of contemporary art: America, an 18-carat solid gold toilet. The conceptual masterpiece, which once gleamed inside the Guggenheim Museum’s pristine white galleries, was yanked from its plumbing and vanished into the black market, never to be seen again.

A Golden Throne for America’s Royal Hiney

In what reads like a pitch for an art film or a postmodern fever dream, journalist Carey Dunne goes on a thoughtful search for the story behind artist Maurizio Cattelan’s “epic troll,” a solid gold toilet named “America”.

“Waiting To Pee in ‘America,’ the Gold Toilet at the Guggenheim”
by Carey Dunne
Hyperallergic
September 23, 2016

aotp_america While waiting in line to pee in “America,” a toilet cast in 18-karat gold and installed in a Guggenheim Museum bathroom, I ran into my friend Fritz Mead, who lives in a shack he built himself out of scrap wood in a backyard next to a skate bowl he also built himself. The shack doesn”t have plumbing, so to use a working toilet he has to leave his shack and go into the basement apartment next door.

Given his apparent ambivalence about plumbing “” let alone luxury plumbing “” I was surprised to see Fritz waiting to use the gold toilet, which is the work of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Estimated to be worth as much as $2.5 million, “America” (which opened at the Guggenheim last week), will remain installed in an otherwise ordinary fourth floor bathroom for a year. (When asked exactly how much the toilet cost, a guard said, “If you have to ask, you already know,” a riddle I am still trying to solve.)

Cattelan “intends visitors to use the toilet just as they would any other facility in the building,” according to the wall text. It gets special treatment, though: only one visitor is allowed inside the stall at a time, for no more than five minutes; the toilet seat must not be lifted; a security guard inspects the toilet after each visit; and a cleaning crew cleans it with a special gold-cleaning product every 20 minutes. The wait time when I visited was two hours.

Read the rest of the story here.

January 13, 2012December 15, 2023

Prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s Swan Song

Submitted by Roger:

Mister Wrong
by Carl Swanson
NY Magazine
October 23, 2011:

After he”s done dangling his oeuvre from the Guggenheim”s atrium, Maurizio Cattelan plans to retire from the art world. It”ll be like being dead””or resurrected.

Maurizio Cattelan”s first show in New York, in 1994, consisted of a self-portrait in the form of a live donkey wandering around a gallery under a chandelier, braying inconsolably. That show wasn”t up long””there were noise complaints””but even now, when his always-wry sculptures sell for millions and his unbelievably elaborate full-rotunda Guggenheim retrospective is about to open, he retains that same posture of self-suspicion. “Today I would say I don”t know how I arrived at this point,” he says, sitting on a bench near a playground on West 28th Street, not far from the West Chelsea galleries, cocking a knowing eyebrow at a sudden whiff of marijuana in the air.* “I don”t know how I arrived at this point, at the Guggenheim. There must be something wrong somewhere.”