The Guggenheim's new throne

There’s now one more place to sit down in New York’s Guggenheim Museum: Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan has created an 18-karat-gold toilet for one of its bathrooms. The 55-year-old Cattelan is renowned for his irreverent works: His statue of a hand giving the middle finger stands in front of Milan’s stock exchange, and when art collector Peter Brant commissioned him to create a sculpture of his supermodel wife, Stephanie Seymour, Cattelan delivered a nude bust inspired by hunting trophies. (Cattelan produced it in an edition of three so other men could also have a trophy wife.) As for Cattelan’s new gold throne—a sly art-historical wink to ‘Fountain’, the signed urinal Marcel Duchamp created in 1917—Guggenheim visitors can either admire it from afar or express their opinion of the work in the most basic way: The toilet is functional.