New York: The queue for the toilet goes out of the building, down Madison Avenue, around the corner on 75th Street and into the Upper East Side.

But these people don’t need to use the bathroom. The toilet they’re there to see isn’t connected to the pipes.

Rather, it’s a 101-kilogram, 18-carat gold throne that is up for sale at Sotheby’s new auction house, the Breuer building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, formerly home to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The toilet that is the talk of New York is another conceptual artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose 2019 work Comedian – a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall – was sold by Sotheby’s last year for $US6.2 million ($9.6 million).

And the name of this toilet? Why it’s called America , of course. Make of that what you

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