I spent a penny, but I didn’t feel like a million dollars

IN MY review of Maurizio Cattelan’s invigorating new exhibition at Blenheim Palace in Friday’s paper, I refrained from revealing whether I had used the solid gold lavatory installed by the Italian artist.

This was deliberate: I didn’t want to put readers off their breakfast.

Yet, following news that burglars have made off with it, I feel the time has come to reveal I did spend a penny in Cattelan’s £1million lavatory, which goes by the title America.

Something about the lustre of gold insists you leave the surfaces pristine. Otherwise, the experience was disappointingly like a regular visit to the WC.

But this, I suspect, is precisely the point. As ever with Cattelan’s best work, America is both tongue-incheek and deadly serious. It is a blunt, but highly effective and amusing, piece of political satire.

Nobody but a megalomaniacal despot would desire something as absurd as a solid-gold lavatory, surely. Nobody, that is, aside from the bling-obsessed president of the US – or so the title seems to suggest.

It is a piece about viciously divisive inequality, but, at the same time, paradoxically, it is democratic – in the sense that it can be used by all, irrespective of wealth or rank.

Cattelan’s work reminds me of something that his artistic forebear, Andy Warhol, famously said about Coca-Cola – that, no matter who you are (the President, Liz Taylor, or just an ordinary Joe), the drink will always taste the same.

Coke, for Warhol, was the definition of democracy.

Well, you could say something similar about Cattelan’s America.

When you need to go, you need to go – and the relief you feel isn’t more gratifying if you happen to be peeing on gold (unless, that is, you are a very twisted individual).

We humans, with our base, bestial urges and appetites, are simple creatures, after all.

‘The relief you feel isn’t more gratifying, unless, that is, you are a very twisted individual’