There is much to celebrate about the upcoming raft of art exhibitions this autumn, not least Mr Maurizio Cattelan’s solo show at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire (12 September – 27 October). A fine satirical artist (although “art worker” is his preferred nomenclature), Mr Cattelan has not staged a show in the UK for 20 years, and the Blenheim exhibition ought to provide ample opportunity for audiences to reacquaint themselves with his greatest hits. Let’s face it, though, it’s going to be all about the golden toilet.

“America (2016)” is a fully functioning, 18-carat solid gold crapper, originally commissioned to sit pretty in the toilets of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York. Dubbed by Mr Cattelan as representing “one per cent art for the 99 per cent”, America achieved notoriety when Guggenheim curator Ms Nancy Spector rejected a White House request to procure a Van Gogh for the living quarters of President Donald Trump. Instead, Ms Spector offered the long-term loan of Mr Cattelan’s artwork “should the President and First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House” with the complimentary provision of “all the instructions for its installation and care”. The offer was rejected. Excitingly, however, the Blenheim show will feature a fully plumbed-in “America”, which will offer visitors the opportunity to evacuate into the very toilet that proved too rich for the no doubt indefatigable bowels of President Trump.

Similarly heady, albeit of a different bouquet, is the V&A’s Tim Walker: Wonderful Things (21 September – 8 March 2020), a solo London show for the esteemed fashion photographer. Mr Walker’s back catalogue of woozy, fairytale fantabulosa for Vogue and Love will be out in full force, but more noteworthy is a display of 150 new photographs, each of which has been inspired by objects from the museum’s sprawling galleries and archives, including smut-heavy erotica, stained-glass windows, jewelled snuff boxes and Indian miniatures. Mr Walker is greatly admired within the realms of fashion and Wonderful Things should prove the perfect platform to see what he can do when his eye is allowed to range.

For those fully gorged on the candy-cane sumptuousness of Mr Walker, a suitable digestif may come in the form of Sir Antony Gormley, whose austere sculpture will go on display as part of a major new exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London (21 September – 3 December). Billed as a specific response to both the scale of the galleries and their Beaux-Arts architecture, Sir Antony’s exhibition will bring together his early 1970s work with contemporary installations. “Lost Horizon I” will set a series of cast-iron figures around the galleries’ floors, walls and ceilings, while “Clearing VII” is a maze comprising 7km (four miles) of coiled metal through which a path must be meticulously picked. The Royal Academy describes Sir Antony’s exhibition as inviting “visitors to slow down and become aware of their own bodies”, although presumably in a fashion radically different from the manner in which Mr Cattelan’s golden toilet achieves the same task.