The Bible says that when the Jewish people were waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, a bunch of them freaked out and started worshiping a golden calf while they were waiting. America, having its own freakout as a people, hasn't built a golden calf (that I know of) but we did welcome a golden toilet last year during some of the chaos. And if you want to experience sitting on a throne of gold, you've got a little under a month left to do so.
The Guggenheim's fully functional golden toilet, an art installation by Italian sculptor Mauirizio Cattelan, has been on display since last September in a one-person bathroom at the museum. "America" is a normal-sized toilet, except for the fact that it's made of somewhere between 70 and 120 pounds of 18-karat gold, making it much more expensive than the average toilet slobs like us are used to using.
Sadly, the exhibition is coming to an end on September 15th, so make sure you get to the Guggenheim by then if you want to do your business on America. Just be prepared to wait, since the museum's artistic director Nancy Spector wrote that over "one hundred thousand people have waited patiently in line for the opportunity to commune with art and with nature."
And while the golden toilet named America is in part about income inequality and runaway wealth getting hoarded by a select few, Spector wrote that it's also, of course, about Donald Trump:
When the artist proposed the sculpture in mid-2015, Donald Trump had just announced his bid for the presidency. It was inconceivable at the time that this business mogul, he of the eponymous gilded tower, could actually win the White House. When the sculpture comes off view on September 15, Trump will have been in office for 238 days, a term marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril.
