Art collectors have a chance Tuesday to buy one of the world's most lucrative latrines: a solid gold, fully functional toilet.

The piece, by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — goes up for auction Tuesday evening at Sotheby's in New York. The starting bid will be the market value of the 101-kilogram (223-pound), 18-karat-gold work, currently about $10 million.

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Cattelan has said the piece, titled “America, satirizes superwealth.

“Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise,” he once said. Sotheby's, for its part, calls the commode an “incisive commentary on the collision of artistic production and commodity value.”

Owned

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