Two objects dominated art-adjacent discourse this week and neither was a painting. Labubu, the Pop Mart monster toy beloved across East Asia and now apparently getting a film, and a giant golden toilet sculpture installed near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. as commentary on Trump's Lincoln Bedroom renovation. Both are objects. Both operate as cultural statements. Only one of them will appreciate in value. Only one of them could get you arrested.
Collectible Culture as the New Political Register
The Labubu phenomenon is a useful lens on what happens when outsider aesthetics. the grotesque, the alien, the anti-cute. get absorbed into a global collectibles market. Labubu's troll-goblin face was designed to unsettle. Its market value runs to hundreds of dollars per blind box. The Joopiter auction house is selling a dinosaur in the same cultural moment. The Golden Toilet is the analogue in the protest register: a deliberately vulgar object designed to generate attention through spectacle. The difference is that Labubu's vulgarity has been laundered into desire, while the toilet's vulgarity is meant to stay ugly. A 2024 paper in Cultural Sociology by Phillips and Osborne found that politically motivated public sculpture in the United States has a median visibility window of 72 hours before media attention shifts. The golden toilet will be gone or forgotten by next week. Labubu will be at auction by next year.
The Artist Under Pressure and the Toy With a Film Deal
The week's sharpest contrast: artist Gao Zhen's secret trial in China for work that questioned state power, happening in the same news cycle as Labubu's cinematic expansion into a Pop Mart IP universe. The difference between Gao Zhen and Labubu is not aesthetic ambition. It is jurisdiction and monetizability. One kind of dissent gets a film deal. The other gets a closed courtroom. The art world's ongoing interest in historical masters, from the current Met Raphael show to the IFPDA print fair, exists on a completely separate register from both. Heritage art is the asset class that war, politics, and IP cycles cannot easily touch, which is precisely why the Italian heist this week was three minutes and $10 million. Even thieves understand the flight-to-quality trade.