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.

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 by an unnamed collector, it's one of two such toilets that Cattelan creat

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