So, the question is: How will Ripley’s Believe It or Not! exhibit Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016), purchased at Sotheby’s Breuer Building for $12.1 million last month? Will visitors be permitted to use this eighteen-carat gold toilet? Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is leaving the possibility tantalizingly open. (You might imagine that the line would be long, wonder how they would keep visitors to their allotted time, speculate on the provided toilet paper.) And into what art historical framework do Ripley’s Believe It or Not! plan to insert this iconic work? Will it be introduced to illustrate the art of today’s capacity to use “shock, irritation and moral ambivalence to raise central questions of our time,” as the text announcing Cattelan’s recent award of the prestigious Preis der Nationalgalerie put it? Were the curators at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! able to persuade their board that it was worth the investment because they were likewise convinced that “in a time of increasing political polarization” it would encourage visitors “to view remembrance not as compulsion or obligation, but as a vital and relevant engagement with the present and the future?”
It seems more likely that Ripley’s Believe It or Not! shelled out for this toilet because, and here we might take our lead from the institution’s name, it is confident that the millions of people who visit its “odditoriums” each year will be amazed to learn that it is taken seriously as a work of art by those experts who claim the authority to make that determination. That they are banking that this curio will engender the same fascination normally reserved for cannibal cutlery, sculptures made from human hair, a six-legged cow, and other highlights of the collection. Moreover, that they understand its attraction as deriving not from the voluminous sophistry that supports it in contemporary art contexts but rather from its status as the expression of some minority culture so alien to the lives of most people, and governed by such esoteric rules and rituals, as to render it thoroughly bizarre. And should “we,” as members or at least observers of that legitimating “art world,” be concerned that the field is perceived, by a significant majority of the population, as such?
Readers will make up their own minds. It seems likely that their own position in relation to that “art world” will go some way to shaping their opinion of whether this solid-gold toilet will suffice to overcome “political polarization.” A week after the completion of an auction that generated much talk among collectors and dealers about the art market’s recovery of its “confidence,” workers at the UK’s flagship Tate Galleries went on strike to protest, among other things, the disparity in salaries between the museum’s management and its staff. They were joined on the picket line by artists, including past winners of the Turner Prize. At around the same time, it emerged that the organization responsible for nominating the artist now chosen to represent the United States at Venice had likely been put together expressly for the purpose by backers of President Trump, in order, in an ironic commentary on the function of high culture far outstripping that achieved by Cattelan, to support an artist whose work would align with “American values and policies” and at the same time “maintain a non-political character.”
Anyone with their eyes open will be able to supply their own examples from contexts wider than the art world. For all the handwringing, they offer a reminder that certain forms of “polarization” are to be welcomed, if they serve to make clear on which side of a line people stand. One of those lines divides people who think that Cattelan’s work and the filigree, weightless rhetoric used to justify it represents an adequate intellectual and aesthetic response to the times through which we are living, from those who do not.
