Meet the artist Maskull Lasserre, Arsenal Contemporary, 13 May 2026

“The forest reveals its truth for those who are travelling through it on foot.”
—Werner Herzog, “I Rant Against the Jungle”

Trees comprise forests. Though seldom do we see both at once.

Our human perception is such that it focusses upon orders of magnitude, from minute detail to grand scale. Take a walk through a forest and observe this spectrum of awareness in action. Thus, knowing God is impossible because we either apprehend His individual works or an abstract accumulation thereof.

A forest is comprised of trees just as the Kingdom of Heaven is made up of minor miracles.

Andy Stott with Corporation and William Hayes-Dulude, Espace SAT, 9 May 2026

“Those who remain at the surface do so at their own peril
Those who dive beneath the surface glorify the grotesque.”
—Genesis P-Orridge & cEvin Key, “Beauty Is the Enemy”

American Transcendentalists considered truth, righness, and beauty to be self-evident. The philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce in the early 20^th century conceived of these virtues as the “Ends” of phenomena, under the purview of normative science, the laws of which to Peirce were both universal and necessary.

The universality of truth, rightness, and beauty is indicative of Peirce’s pragmatic understanding of nature and the specificity of the American interpretation of Idealism. But the notion of their necessity addresses something more profound.

Logically speaking, order could not emerge from chaos without truth, rightness, or beauty. Nor could nature function in absence of these three Ends in divine equilibrium, a sort of contemporary, new-world holy trinity.

“I am going to make a series of assertions which will sound wild,” Peirce proclaimed in his fifth lecture on the subject at Harvard University in 1903, “although I cannot omit them if I am to set the supports of pragmatism in their true light.” For Peirce, truth, rightness, and beauty transcended human taste and were philosophically unquestionable. This left no room for argument from his audience, whom he proceeded to call “undeveloped” nominalists, a bold and patent dig at New England’s intellectual elite.

“Reality consists in regularity,” Peirce proclaimed. “Real regularity is active law.”

Céline in Dior: A Dazzling Moment, Musée McCord Stewart, Until 13 September 2026

“Your beauty won’t be anything
When I take off my glasses.”
Leonard Cohen, Death of a Lady’s Man

Beauty activates action. It is impossible to remain passive in the presence of prettiness. And given that beauty is universal and necessary, it is one of the most important motivating forces of nature.

However, aesthetic beauty is not synonymous with truth — often, quite the opposite. We attain beauty through augmentation and perversion and concealment and outright denial of our true nature, polishing, as it were, the brass on the Titanic.

Therefore, deception pragmatically galvanizes nature just as effectively as veracity.

Turandot, Orchestre Philharmonique et Chœur des Mélomanes, Maison Symphonique, 10 May 2026

“Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theatre of their enslavement.”
Susan Sontag, On Women

More than in any other social station, American First Ladies may be the world’s most heavily objectified and endlessly scrutinized women.

Women’s Wear Daily, the tabloid journal that chronicled “microtrends” before they were called microtrends, obsessed over Jacqueline Kennedy’s every purchase: suede skirts, knee socks, Gucci shoes. John Fairchild, WWD’s publisher in the 1960s, called Kennedy “Her Elegance.” In contrast, he dubbed Kennedy’s successor, Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Her Efficiency.”

Women’s Wear Daily treads much more carefully today when writing about Mrs. Trump, restricting its coverage to strict facts without editorializing or judgement. Among the harshest criticism it has published since Trump’s first presidency is of Melania “not being ultrathin,” as well as revealing that Wildes & Weinberg, the immigration firm that represented John Lennon during his deportation hearings, helped secure her citizenship, which she received in 2006.

Eventually, WWD turned on the Kennedy clan, too, writing of the late President’s daughter in their signature all-caps headlines (a style that a certain similarly snarky head of state has adopted), “THERE IS NO QUESTION THAT CAROLINE DRESSES MUCH YOUNGER THAN HER AGE.”

Défilé 2026 de l’École supérieure de mode, Centre de design de l’UQAM, 12 May 2026

“The pretty things are going to hell
They wore it out, but they wore it well.”
—David Bowie, “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell”

If beauty is equivalent with rightness and truth, then there is no cause to damn the righteous and truly beautiful. Deceitful beauty, however, is narcissism — “vexation of spirit,” as it is written in Ecclesiastes 2.

The question of what to do with one’s days is at the root of the Western conception of damnation and salvation. Labour in wisdom, and not for pleasure, is considered goodness before God. Labour in sin condemns the sinner to gather up all she labours for and give it to her that is good.

Labour for true beauty, however, must be righteous. Beauty gladdens the heart and unencumbers the spirit. Labour for true beauty also obscures the nature of God and makes Him unknowable. To conceal God’s work is God’s work.

Ecclesiastes 3 is among the Bible’s most well-known chapters, made famous by Pete Seeger in his song, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” which The Byrds in 1965 turned into an international hit. Fashion is instructive here as it is literally seasonal. There is a time proper to scarves and boots, and another time for shirtsleeves and sandals. To make peace in a time of war, or to acquire in a time of loss, is to disobey the Ecclesiastical calendar, like wearing white after labour day.

“He hath made every thing beautiful in his time,” it is written in verse 11, and so ugliness is also a form of seasonal beauty. There is nothing which does not eventually have its moment and purpose. This philosophy is fundamentally pragmatic because it positions the use value of beauty above its aesthetic appeal.

Beautiful utility is good work. Alternately, futility is vanity.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Suffering Machines, Aude B. Verville. Photographed for NicheMTL (with thanks to Rory Creelman.)}