An 18-karat gold toilet titled “America” was stolen from an exhibit at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace and family home of Winston Churchill, early Saturday.
Before the theft, the toilet was part of a larger exhibit featuring artwork by its creator Maurizio Cattelan that began earlier in the week. The artist, however, found some humor in the incident.
“At first, when they woke me up this morning with the news,” he said in an email to the New York Times, “I thought it was a prank: Who’s so stupid to steal a toilet? I had forgotten for a second that it was made out of gold.”
“‘America’ was the one percent for the 99 percent, and I hope it still is,” he said of the piece. “I want to be positive and think the robbery is a kind of Robin Hood-inspired action.”
Cattelan added that the theft was not a prank and that the news of the toilet heist “is deadly serious if even a little bit surreal since the subject of the robbery was a toilet.”
Police are still investigating the robbery but have arrested a 66-year-old man, who has not yet been charged. The toilet, which is still missing, had been plumbed to the building and left “significant damage and flooding” when it was removed, according to a detective inspector. Police believed a “group of offenders” was behind the theft and used at least two vehicles to pull it off.
The toilet was made out of 103 kilograms of gold and is worth more than $4 million, according to an accredited precious metals dealer who added that the thieves could melt it “into gold bars in days and there would be no way to trace them” if they had the proper equipment.
“It is deeply ironic that a work of art portraying the American dream and the idea of an elite object made available to all should be almost instantly snatched away and hidden from view,” Dominic Hare, the chief executive of Blenheim Palace, said.
The toilet gained attention back in 2016 when it was installed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The museum later offered it to the White House in lieu of a Vincent van Gogh painting that had been requested for President Trump and first lady Melania Trump’s private living quarters.
