Exhibition Review: Out of Step: Toronto's Bata Shoe Museum

Abstract

A museum specializing in the display of shoes might strike the uninitiated reader as yet another in a myriad of specialty showcases that takes individual obsessions and turns them into roadside attractions for curiosity-seeking tourists. In this category one could include the Museum of Beverage Containers in Tennessee, the Potato Museum of Maryland, or the Barbed Wire Museum of Kansas. Perhaps the Bata Shoe Museum is only an upscale version of a curio cabinet but, like any attempt toward a totalizing collection of one type of thing, being there can produce a minor epiphany in the viewer who learns to appreciate the artistry of design and execution behind a lowly object typically taken for granted. That being said, there is still something disturbing and deeply ironic about a shoe museum bearing the name of a company in large part responsible for the worldwide disappearance of local, indigenous shoe-making and the spread of mass-marketed plastic