Sotheby’s announced plans to auction the 18-karat sculpture, titled America, with opening bids set at around $10 million.
https://archive.is/Kb4HY (wsj)
The duct-taped banana artwork was a popular culture story in 2019.
Look I know it's an old hat of reactionaries to hate on modern art, but how can you look at banana wall and not be like "damn this be the direct end result of the cia fucking around in art and the entire art world being a front for money laundering (maybe)"? This is so low effort and plain dumb, ohh a gold toilet how edgy 🙄
And it's called America
Boy, they sure got our number with that one!
Like there's so many bad things to lambaste the usa over but this feels like it's DRUMPF coded and very liberal, like I can picture the artists being like "yeah america was good until orange hitler came along!" 
Would have been slightly more poignant if the damn thing sprayed blood every 30 seconds or so
Pretty much.
but how can you look at a banana wall
Because people are still talking about it 6 years later and it always leads to discussions over what should or shouldn't be considered "art," which was the point of duct taping a banana to a wall.
The average normie doesn't interact with the avant garde. You're lucky if you can get people to name 3 living artists. Even luckier if those names aren't Banksy, commercial artists, or something like fantasy/sci-fi/video game/album cover artists (not a criticism of those types. Just pointing out the artists doing shows at museum galas are inaccessible for most people).
Getting them to think about what art means and to look around for actual talent was worth doing, even if it's a low-effort shitpost.
shitposts used to be better
Yeah, this isn't even edgy art. It's boring edgy art. It's like someone reposting greentext from 2014 or something.
A golden toilet is nothing new or unique, I'm sure it was featured in the old television show "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous", one of those oil rich monarchs had one.
I also remember another absurd luxury item featured in a Tiffany catalogue, it was a tin can, exactly like how it looks when you peal the label off of a can of beans, but it was made of silver and cost thousands. The rich just loves to mock us poors....
223 pounds is 3568 ounces or 101151.1 grams. 18 carat is going for around $102/gram. So the raw gold value is: $10317412.2 Dudes minimum bid is roughly the cost of material. I'd make a gold toilet for $300 000, but I'd do it for more too :)
that's actually kind of amusing. like a statement that his effort/labor in this has no value, or the object has no value as art, only its value as raw materials to be scrapped, melted down and sold.
the implication is if some buys it for $10m and then sells it for more later, it's all just speculation and b.s. if the original artist valued their own effort at $0.
a lot of high end, prestige modern art feels like an aggressive insult towards collectors. like that banksy piece that ahredded itself as soon as it sold.
That's exactly what I found funny about it. Like they just didn't want to be out the cost of the material.
I will just never see this kind of shit as artistic. I'll spend my entire life arguing with everybody that I talk to about it and then finally when I die God will tell me "You were always right, can I have your autograph?"
A fucking SLOAN VALVE commode? Jfc.
Duchamp did this idea like 110 years ago, and didn't trump store classified files next to a gold toilet? That's real performance art
This loser doesnt realise you can stain your toilet gold with piss
Can you? I thought gold was pretty inert. Maybe if you don't clean it well, the piss will leave a residue
You know, gold makes the piss water taste different.
Wildly unsubtle, still pretty funny, I’ll enjoy it upsetting the “I hate modern art” crowd.
And the thing people hate isn't even Modern art. It's Postmodern. Modern art is the period from the end of the Renaissance (late 1600s/early 1700s) until the invention of color photography and its adoption by the public post-WWII circa 1946.
Which is exactly why someone duct taped a banana to a wall lmao.
the 18-karat sculpture, titled America
This is the new R. Mutt and you're not allowed to be mad at it