Oh, the ways women suffer for fashion. One of the most egregious perpetrators of fashion crimes is none other than that object of burning desire, that target of endless lust: the shoe. Shoe designers, like fashion designers, often go for over-the-top looks without really considering functionality. These well-heeled examples are often high on form but short on function, though some manage to come up short in both departments.

(image via: Virtual Shoe Museum)

Although most people would want to avoid attracting small children to the dangerous looking heels on the back of a shoe, these heeled wedges do just that. They feature a brightly-colored toy surrounding the heel, making this the perfect footwear for up-and-coming Pied Pipers who need a new way to lure children behind them.

(images via: Design Milk)

Unexpectedly stepping on a LEGO brick in bare feet is one of the most painful experiences the human body can endure, so it seems counter-intuitive to attach LEGOs to the very place where your feet will be. The wisdom of the design, however, is that if the LEGOs are stuck to your shoes they won’t be littering the floor.

(image via: Virtual Shoe Museum)

To make the Aries shoe, the designer used several types of animal skins to represent a created hybrid. One short cautionary note: these shoes may remind you of mountain goats, but don’t try rock climbing in them.

(image via: Virtual Shoe Museum)

If there is anything more painful than high heels, it’s a pair of high heels made of wood, strapped to your legs up to the knee, with absolutely zero support or protection from whatever may be on the floor. The designer calls these Stelts, and while they are indeed a work of art it is hard to imagine that anyone would willingly wear these.

(image via: Design Milk)

Before you ask “why bread shoes?” we would like to pose an equally important question: Why not bread shoes? While they would be the furthest thing from table-worthy after shuffling around in them all day, we would have to imagine that slipping your feet into warm loaves of bread would be a ridiculously pleasant sensation.

(image via: Virtual Shoe Museum)

Stepping into the Pinned Shoes, on the other hand, would be anything but pleasant. The heeled shoes are made up of two kilograms of pins, making them heavy and uncomfortable, but still oddly fascinating to look at.

(images via: Virtual Shoe Museum 1, 2)

The Shoe Heel and Double Decker shoes share a concept: two shoes must be better than one, and four obviously better than two. Both shoes use a second shoe as a heel, to some surprisingly unique results. While Shoe Heel looks like a wearable work of art, the Double Decker shoes look almost like a whimsical shoe factory accident.

(image via: GeekAlerts)

Walking barefoot on grass is one of the greatest pleasures of summer. In an attempt to capture that feeling year-round, Kush created the Grass Sandals. Not to be confused with Cinderella’s glass slippers, these silly shoes are beyond odd.

(images via: Virtual Shoe Museum 1, 2)

Ask any woman what the most important part of a shoe is. Right after “the grass on the inside,” she’ll probably say “the part that keeps street stuff from touching my feet.” The Souless Shoe and Golden Heel both take the idea of open-toed shoes a bit far by completely eliminating the front part of the shoe, instead basically tying an elevated spike to the wearer’s heels.

(image via: Virtual Shoe Museum)

When designing anything via computer model, building a wire frame is the first step. After that, you begin adding more and more detail until you have a 3D object. The designer of these shoes wanted to invoke the image of a computer wire frame model while at the same time calling to mind the low-res wire frame video games of the 1980s.

(images via: Dornob)

While most of these shoes are works of art in their own right, the Coloring Pencil Shoes are the only pair that make art everywhere they go. As the wearer walks along, colorful marks are left behind. These are maybe not the shoes to wear to your new boss’s house, but they could make a morning walk to work much more interesting than usual.

(image via: Virtual Shoe Museum)

These Steel Folded Shoes may look torturously uncomfortable, but the idea behind them is sound: a pair of shoes that collapse into a smaller size for travel. Of course, women have been wearing strappy sandals and ballet flats on vacation for just that purpose for many years, and those shoes tend not to cause painful collapse-related injuries like these may.

(image via: Dezeen)

The Mojito shoe is a deconstruction of ordinary shoe design. The designer realized that as long as the heel and the ball of the foot were supported, the rest of the shoe could take any form at all – or even no form. He set about creating the graceful shoe above which, to the designer, looks like a twisty piece of lime peel.

(image via: Virtual Shoe Museum)

Looking like a carefully arranged pile of Post-It Notes, the 100 Pieces of Paper shoes are a sculptural exploration of shape and form. Plus, they give you a handy place to jot down your to-do list for the weekend.

(images via: Virtual Shoe Museum)

The Contour Shoe jumps off of paper and into real life, becoming a (seemingly) 2D object in a 3D world. They resemble a simple line drawing sketched around a human foot, and their simple line continues on with the leg. The shoe and leg appear to be one continuous object. Balancing on their ice skate-thin soles seems like it would be quite a challenge.

(image via: Virtual Shoe Museum)

To be fair, these insane cork flip-flops were meant as a joke and not as an actual product. But to be even fairer, we have seen people wearing worse things on their feet. This particular pair was created for a Dutch comedy show called “Kreatief Met Kurk” (Creative With Cork).

(image via: Gajitz)

Multi-tasking is usually a positive thing, but not when it makes you look this goofy. These sandals feature a built-in metal detector that will let you hunt for treasure on the beach…while looking like someone who is supposed to be at home on house arrest.

(image via: Design Milk)

These fang shoes look a bit like cleats for the haute couture crowd. Featuring ten “fangs” per shoe, the vicious footwear is sturdy enough to support the wearer on trips down the catwalk and back. You may want to think twice before wearing them to the airport for your next flight, however.

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A man takes a seat on a park bench and opens a pair of suitcases, carefully adjusting a few things inside, placing a few small objects in just the right spot. Then an alarm clock sounds, a pencil comes down onto a trigger and the most entrancing sequence of events takes place, one after the other. Melvin the Mini Machine is the creation of Dutch design studio HEYHEYHEY, and it’s possibly the coolest portable Rube Goldberg machine ever invented.

As music starts playing, the choreographed movements begin, flinging objects from one of the suitcases to the other, making their own little sounds. The fact that all of this magic can fit inside these small compartments, compact enough to travel around the world, is even more incredible when you consider the fact that HEYHEYHEY previously created the world’s largest Rube Goldberg machine.

Melvin the Magical Mixed Media Machine was a room-sized exhibit made for 2010 Dutch Design Week, and as cool as it was, it had one big limitation: it couldn’t be moved. Lots of people who couldn’t travel to the exhibit wanted to see it. Thus, the idea for the mini was born.

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Whether they’re just the arms of a mannequin attached to inanimate urban objects or gory, all-too-realistic hands clutching violent video games, severed limbs are definitely one way to grab the attention of passersby on the street. Detached body parts appear in street art in ways that are both humorous and disturbing.

Artist Mark Jenkins is known for using heads, torsos and other body parts for jaw-dropping installations highlight the plight of the homeless or just have fun with unexpected visuals, like the mannequin with a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign for a head.

These detached legs may just be the most famous in all the world. The Wicked Witch’s striped socks and red slippers were spotted on the streets of Verona, Italy in 2011.

Higher Level Art temporarily installed plastic mannequin arms on fire hydrants and parking meters in Covington, Kentucky.

Known for his series ‘Little People‘, which installs tiny scenes in urban areas, London-based artist Slinkachu dropped what looks like the severed finger of a giant among figures that are barely an inch tall.

Londoners were reportedly sickened by the sight of muscular black-and-white arms clutching copies of the SEGA game ‘MadWorld’. The PR stunt might have generated some controversy, but it also got the game a lot of attention.

‘Larry’s Legs: Are They Art?’ asks the Sag Harbor Express, reporting on efforts by the city’s Zoning Board to remove a sixteen-foot pair of legs from the outside of a local couple’s home. The sculpture was created by Larry Rivers in the 1960s.

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To many people around the world, salt is just a substance that makes food taste better. But to the Japanese, it’s deeply symbolic, an indispensable part of death rituals that imparts purification of the body and soul. Artist Motoi Yamamoto draws upon the role of salt in his culture, using it as a art medium that he painstakingly packs into sculptures or squeezes into intricate drawings. The artist aims to confront viewers with the reality of death, in the form of stark white installations that mimic trailing vines, networks of neural nerves and endless paths of pure sand or snow. Here are 23 photos and 2 videos of 12 of Yamamoto’s most stunning salt artworks.

Floating Garden

Yamamoto began working with salt as an art medium after his sister’s death from brain cancer at 24 years old. Many of his works, including the ‘Floating Garden‘ series, resemble microscopic imagery of the brain.

Labyrinth Series

“Drawing a labyrinth with salt is like following a trace of my memory. Memories seem to change and vanish as time goes by. However, what I seek is the way in which I can touch a precious moment in my memories that cannot be attained through pictures or writings. I always silently follow the trace, that is controlled as well as uncontrolled from the start point after I have completed it.”

UTSUSEMI

The artist packed salt into a tall, narrow staircase for the work ‘Utsusemi’. Giving in to the natural processes of destruction and decay, Yamamoto allows the salt to crumble over time, often intentionally leaving the sculptures out in the rain so they can melt, changing with exposure to the elements until they dissipate altogether.

A Corridor to Remembrance

Yamamoto reveals his intention behind this large-scale work, ‘A Corridor of Remembrance.’ “With the art works entitled “a corridor of remembrance” or “land of meditation”, what Motoi Yamamoto represents could be described as an unknowable realm in which the notion of death unfolds. These site-specific works, consisting of a massive quantity of bricks made of salt, piled up in layers together with rusty iron slabs, overwhelm the viewers in size and volume. Concealed by the slabs, one is not able to see the interior and depth of the edifice but a narrow path emerges from between the slabs. The path, which is too narrow for adults to go in to, gives a sense of a potency that demands a distinct physical response, as it leads to total darkness. It gives an interstice in the flux of time and space of everydayness in the present day, and embodies a sense of unconceivable and yet our physical instinct can respond to it.”

Forest of Beyond

One of his most incredibly complex works, ‘Forest of Beyond’ was created for the one-year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan in 2011. Currently on display at the Hakone Open Air Museum, ‘Forest of Beyond’ resembles the roots of a tree.

Forest of the Skyscraper

An 11-foot-tall ‘skyscraper’ made of salt, ‘Forest of the Skyscraper’ is another work that was allowed to crumble, thus changing significantly between its initial creation and its removal from the gallery.

Forest of This World

Connecting the role of salt in Japanese culture to the art and meditative act of sand gardening, ‘Forest of This World‘ was installed at the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Kanagawa from July 2011 to March 2012.

Sakura

The petals of cherry blossoms are perfectly rendered in Yamamoto’s series ‘Sakura‘. Looking as if they just fell from a tree, the petals are layered in such a way that they look amazingly three-dimensional and realistic.

Room

Among Yamamoto’s earliest salt art works is ‘Room‘, an installation at 300days Gallery in Tokyo in September 2000. The pure whiteness of the salt applied to the far wall of the gallery blends into the rest of the room, making it look as if the space is beginning to fall apart.

Fountain of Remembrance

Cast boat forms float outward in a circle in ‘Fountain of Remembrance’, an outdoor installation at the Garden of the Sculptures in Veracruz, Mexico. The installation was captured both before and after a rain that dissolved much of the salt.

Unfulfilled

Bursting forth from the gallery wall, a large triangular slab of iron recalls the bow of a rusting ship breaking through sea ice topped with snow. “The void of an image in the darkness is a crack which induces the feeling of the unknowable beyond our everyday life. In that, one might be led to a sacred sphere through the path of salt.”

Wedge

‘Wedge’ was an installation at the Telecom Center in Tokyo that looked like a path of snow, starting at the front door and ascending up a staircase.

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