How impromptu anyway?

  
At first glance, this looks like some shoes tossed up on a ledge in the foundation wall of the (new) Co-op building. The handwritten sign does not appear to be lettered with any particular care, and the whole thing kind of looks like something a drunk person did, perhaps with some grander purpose in mind, but without a great deal of effort. My first thought was to refer to this as in “impromptu” art installation.

But then, I got to thinking… I don’t actually know how much effort went into planning this, nor do I have any idea what it “means”. Did the artist pick out each shoe for its unique characteristics? The brands of the shoes suggest they might just be things that were laying around… but they could also represent the highly available Chinese-made brands that have, arguably, made American manufacturing obsolete, and forced millions of people into poverty and drug addiction when their jobs, and indeed the primary purpose of their lives, disappeared for no reason. And they’re all in “normal” sizes… Not too big, not too small. Again, is this because there’s a bell-curve distribution of shoe sizes at the thrift store? Or is it a subtle, well-reasoned representation of the decline of the American middle class, the bell curve’s hump flattening even as the tails get bigger and taller? 

And what wall is it that we are trying to climb? Racism? Prosperity? Happiness? Cruelty to animals?
And did the artist, funded no doubt by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, travel the country for a year looking for a blank concrete wall with a ledge suitable to display these shoes? 

The last time I saw an art installation composed primarily of shoes, it was in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. The shoes weren’t remarkable in any way until you read the text explaining that these were the shoes of people who died in the gas chambers. Suddenly, those fucking shoes made you cry. 

On balance, I think this is more likely to be something done by a drunk person… but that is a question best answered by the beholder.