The streets may be paved with gold in heaven but in New York, it’s a gold toilet providing creature comfort – and an eyeful for visitors to the city’s Guggenheim museum.

The working toilet, cast in brightly gleaming gold, has been installed in a fourth-floor bathroom for the private use of the public, taking the notion of an intimate setting for art to a new level.

The installation, “America,” is the first piece that Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan has exhibited since his 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim.
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Starting Friday, it can be used as if an ordinary unisex toilet by the museum’s visitors, Katherine Brinson, curator of contemporary art at the museum, told AFP.

Visitors “will have a remarkably intimate and unusual encounter with this particular artwork,” she said.

A guard will be posted outside the bathroom door, said the museum, which has refused to put a dollar value on the piece.

Brinson said the work had “many layers, many possible interpretative lenses that one can bring to it.”

“One can see the title as a critique but also as idealistic. After all this is a work about creating access and opportunity for all for a very wide public, even though it is this lavish luxury item.”