ART VS. JUNK — THE GUGGENHEIM IS EXHIBITING A WORKING SOLID GOLD TOILET:

Hooters played a mean trick on a waitress more than a decade ago. It told her that, as the winner of a beer-selling contest, she would get a new Toyota. She was led blindfolded to the parking lot—where she was given a new toy Yoda doll from the “Star Wars” franchise.

This was not very nice, and her subsequent lawsuit produced a settlement and a new car. But there are worse things than perpetrating an adolescent prank on one unsuspecting victim. Such as perpetrating an adolescent prank on millions of them.

In a few days the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan will unveil a new work of art, or rather a new work of “art”: a functioning, solid gold toilet, which will be installed in one of the bathrooms. It is by Maurizio Cattelan, whom The New York Times describes as “one of the most expensive living artists,” and is titled “Maurizio Cattelan: ‘America’.” That is tiresomely predictable, and about as clever as Internet trolls referring to Barack Obama as “Obummer.” But like “Obummer,” it flatters the dogmas of its intended audience.

The political angle matters less than the aesthetic one, though. A gold toilet is to real art what a toy Yoda is to a new automobile. But there is a sad difference between these two cases: Everyone at Hooters knew the toy Yoda was not an actual car. Nobody pretended the stuffed doll and the Japanese automobile belonged to the same taxonomic or ontological category.

Too much contemporary art tries, with a great deal of seriousness and self-regard, to claim just that.

I’m not sure how “contemporary” this, since Marcel Duchamp kicked off the dada movement a century ago via a urinal he called “Fountain,” which Duchamp created for an avant-garde exhibition in New York. But then, as original National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts said over 40 years ago, you can only be avant-garde for so long until you become garde.

And note this passage in the New York Times:

It will, instead, be installed in early May just off one of the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, in a small, humble room where visitors often feel the urge to spend some time alone. The room has tiles, a sink, a mirror and a lock on the door. And now, instead of its standard Kohler toilet, it will have a solid 18-karat-gold working replica of one, a preposterously scatological apotheosis of wealth whose form is completed in its function: You could go into the restroom just to bask in its glow, Mr. Cattelan said, but it becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering nature’s call.

As James Lileks memorably wrote in early Screedblog, “If art contains shit, we should take it at its word.”