British authorities have charged four men with the 2019 theft of a $5.95 million golden toilet, the creation of the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan, from historic Blenheim Palace in England where it was being exhibited. The working toilet, called “America,” was conceived as a symbol of American excess and had previously been displayed at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Before its theft, art patrons had been lining up to use the fully working toilet, with a three minute time-limit for crowd control. 

“Maurizio Cattelan’s Golden Toilet in the Time of Trump,” as the Guggenheim called it,  previously made headlines in 2017, when the White House asked the museum to loan it a Van Gogh landscape from its collection for President and Ms. Trump to display in their private quarters. A Guggenheim curator, who was a critic of Mr. Trump, rejected the request, and instead mockingly offered the Trumps the golden toilet, which Mr. Cattelan had called “one-percent art for the ninety-nine percent.” The White House declined. 

When it was stolen two years later from Blenheim Palace, police said the toilet’s removal caused “significant damage and flooding” to the historic estate – an 18th century wonder gifted to John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, after he won a major battle in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession (according to the Oscar-winning 2018 film, “The Favourite,” the palace was actually a gift to the Duke’s wife, Queen Anne’s soon-to-be-displaced “favorite”). Blenheim Palace later became the birthplace of Winston Churchill. Nowadays, the UNESCO World Heritage site is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists a year.

The four men charged on Monday with theft of the golden toilet have been accused of burglary and conspiracy to transfer criminal property. Six men and a woman had been arrested and released in recent years for the theft. Of those seven, the four men named on Monday are the first to be criminally charged. 

The whereabouts of the toilet are still unknown, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever see the ‘golden throne’ again. In 2021, British law enforcement officials speculated that the toilet would have been melted down in order to fence the gold.

“Will we ever see that toilet again? Personally I wonder if it’s in the shape of a toilet to be perfectly honest,” police and crime commissioner Matthew Barber told the BBC. “If you have that large amount of gold I think it seems likely that someone has already managed to dispose of it one way or another.

“It would be great if we can recover it and return it but personally I’m not convinced it’s still in quite the same form it was.”

“America” is not the first of Mr. Cattelan’s pieces that have been stolen . One of his most controversial artworks, consisting of a fresh banana duct taped to a wall, has been eaten by more than one visitor at various installations. The latest incident occurred in Seoul earlier this year when a student ate the fruit at the center of “Comedian” before replacing the empty peel back onto the display, saying he was simply hungry.