We live in a world where people display piles of plastic containers, or their unmade beds, in major museums and call it art.
They are a near-constant presence, crawling around the shadows of alleys and squares in a city where poverty and wealth butt heads on nearly every street corner: shiny new office blocks sit beside ancient shacks, currency traders have set up open-air stands where they display piles of cash, Hyundais brush past donkeys down the city's sole paved street.
Broad Street, in the crowded Marina District, is the center of secondhand-book buying in Lagos, with scores of retailers displaying piles of books on the pavement and on wooden stands.
(It was also fascinating to see early product placement in Herbert Ponting's photographs documenting the trips: boxes marked Colman's are prominently displayed piled up on the ice, acknowledging the mustard manufacturers, one of the trip's sponsors).
The second is a 'stack view' where reads in a region are displayed piled against the reference to reduce the alignment depth.
"Really, we are two shops in one," said Harris Healy, the owner, gesturing to a display table piled with Father's Day books on grilling and graphic novels.
Near Ms. Blanchett was displayed a pile of thin mattresses with a mannequin lying on top, so that may have been "The Princess and the Pea".
Whether the displays are piled with chocolate bonbons or empty but for two mannequins draped suggestively in gauzy blouses, the message is always the same: buy here.
Francis of Assisi's Feces," a striking color work in the manner of Mr. Serrano, which displays a pile of excrement topped by a burning cross.
In 1993, Jerry Della Femina, the advertising executive and restaurateur, dared East Hampton Village officials to arrest him and a business partner, David Silver, for displaying a pile of pumpkins and hay bales in front of their specialty-food shop, the Red Horse Market.
A cheeky art installation, the d?r also includes paneled walls with upholstered leather padding, designed to evoke the inside of a luxury trunk; wooden packing crates that do double duty as display tables; and piles of vintage suitcases (above) that provide a stage set for hats ($85) and scarves ($80 to $90 3434 Little West 12th Street, (212) 647-0991; tedbaker.com.
