Game of Throne

Maurizio Cattelan’s America, on view at Sotheby’s in New York last fall.

With Maurizio Cattelan’s latest act arriving next week, a look back at the improbable saga of the Italian artist’s $6 million golden toilet

By Harry Seymour

Shortly before daybreak on September 14, 2019, five masked men driving two stolen vehicles barreled through the gates of Blenheim Palace, England’s best-known stately home. Sledgehammering a ground-floor window, they passed the room where Winston Churchill was born and headed straight for their target: a solid-gold toilet worth $6 million.

Called America, the toilet was part of a bigger Maurizio Cattelan exhibition. Just hours earlier, party guests had been toasting its success, posing for photographs on the 18-karat throne and flushing Dom Pérignon down its working pipes.

The gang wrenched it from wood paneling, causing water to spray around the room, then rolled its 220-pound body into a Volkswagen Golf and sped down a warren of Cotswolds’ country roads. The whole heist took five minutes. READ ON