Prada Marfa

The night Prada Marfa opened in 2005, thieves broke in and made off with handbags and shoes, exclusively left-footed ones. When Miuccia Prada donated replacements, she sent only right-footed shoes, all size 37. The desert sculpture was built from biodegradable adobe meant to melt back into the Texas landscape, a commentary on fashion’s fleeting nature. Instead, it got shatterproof windows, an alarm system, and became one of the world’s most photographed art installations. The local sheriff quipped he was looking for a one-legged woman with expensive taste.

The theft turned a piece about impermanence into one about permanence instead, which is either the ultimate irony or the artists getting exactly what they didn’t know they wanted. Elmgreen and Dragset had planned for the desert to do the destroying: sun, sand, and time slowly returning the boutique to dust, the closing argument of a piece about how fast luxury goods go out of style. Local thieves had other plans, and so did the internet, which turned a crumbling adobe critique into a pilgrimage site with its own gift shop merchandise and geotag. Twenty years on, the shoes are still mismatched, the door still doesn’t open, and the only thing that decayed on schedule was the joke.