A sign that the market has stopped believing in magic, in narrative, in the mythology of curators.
Cattelan’s toilet, once a media fetish-author, is now evaluated not as a gesture but as precious scrap: a sign that the market has stopped believing in magic, in narrative, in the mythology of curators.
For years we joked too much. Curators dressed like secular shamans, art fairs that looked like pagan temples of provocation, collectors ready to tattoo the word concept on their foreheads just to take part in the ritual. And now? Now the ritual has been invalidated by its own altar: the price. The punk gesture of contemporary art was: “I am worth something because I say I am.” The occult gesture of finance is: “You are worth whatever I can melt you down to.”
An 18-carat gold toilet sold at the price of the metal is much more than an anecdote: it is an omen. It is the image of an era that has decided to switch off the electricity at the great amusement park of the contemporary. But not only that: it has removed the value of the sacred and of the aura from its agenda. In short, the death of the soul manifests itself in contemporary art—and, rest assured, it is about to manifest itself in our everyday lives as well.
Cattelan’s toilet, once a media fetish-author, is now valued not as a gesture but as precious scrap: a sign that the market has stopped believing in magic, in narrative, in the mythology of curators. The market—the real one, the one that does not write catalogues but moves capital—has delivered its verdict: contemporary art has returned to inert matter, to mineral substance, to physical weight. The end of interpretations, wall texts, and neon-lit speeches.
A Klimt at 205 million towers above everything: while the nineteenth century turns into gold, the contemporary returns to tin. There is no longer even conflict: there is only indifference. And indifference, in the language of markets, is more lethal than contempt. Works are no longer evaluated for what they mean but for what they materially are. And if what they are is less noble than a nugget, the game is over.
In this glacial, almost astrological alignment one glimpses the face of the new financial demon: no longer the visionary collector, but the algorithm that weighs, calculates, deposits, arbitrates. A money bull—for art, and soon for life itself. The art that claimed to be superior to economic dynamics has been devoured by them: matter has won. It believed it could joke with capital, provoke it, ridicule it. But capital has no sense of humor. Or rather: it laughs only when it sinks its teeth in.
The golden toilet is the trophy of its silent revenge. It is the symbol of a world that mistook provocation for value, novelty for quality, noise for depth. Now all of this is being melted down—literally. The market is returning to tangibility: stones, metals, stable works, dead authors, museum-grade values. The investor no longer wants to gamble on the concept: he wants to lean on specific weight, density, physical certainty. Contemporary art, rootless, without guarantees, too dependent on the mythology of galleries, offers nothing that can withstand a recessionary cycle.
The golden toilet, therefore, is not Cattelan’s failure: it is the failure of an entire system that mistook irony for structure, provocation for substance, marketing for metaphysics. The hidden message is clear: every era has its oracle. Today it speaks through a glittering toilet that returns to the state of a bullion bar. It is not art that dies: it is a language returning to the womb of matter; it is the death of communicative structures; it is the chaos that is about to arrive.
Those who know how to read this signal will understand that we have entered the phase in which the only true value is what resists: what has weight, what endures, what does not dissolve when the audience becomes distracted. But now it disappears with us. We joked too much with postmodernism: humor froze our blood, sucked out our hearts, cleaned and sterilized our arteries. And now the laughter has buried us in deep sofas like Netflix. What remains is only the metallic echo of a golden toilet hammered at auction, a sanitary object as the symbol of a world: our own golden fleece.
By Vincenzo Profeta
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