A golden throne for the Guggenheim

New York

UNLIKE professional athletes, actors (Gene Hackman) and some novelists (Philip Roth), visual artists don't usually retire. Or if they do, they don't announce it.

But in 2011, Maurizio Cattelan - one of the most expensive living artists, then at the peak of his career and the subject of an uproarious retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum - told the world that he was finished, fatigued both creatively and by the velocity of the money-fuelled art world. During the last couple of years, though, Cattelan found himself itching to make things in three dimensions again.

"Actually, it's even more of a torture not to work than to work," he said. And so he is coming out of retirement with a new sculpture that seems designed to pr…