I. Dawn at the Shoreline

A visitor wakes before dawn and walks to the water. This is not a metaphor. Recently, someone stayed in Toronto near the harbour and could not sleep. Walking east along Queen's Quay, where the buildings thinned and the shoreline opened up, they stood and watched as the light came.

What unfolded was beautiful. But one must be precise about what that means, for the question of beauty has occupied three months of careful thought, and a suspicion has formed: the grammar we use to talk about beauty is part of what confuses us.

The standard construction reads: The sunrise was beautiful. Subject, verb, predicate adjective. The sentence structure implies that beauty is a property of the sunrise, something it possesses, something one discovers by looking at it. The sunrise was beautiful the way it was orange, the way the water was cold. A quality inhering in an object, waiting to be perceived.

But this does not capture what occurred. What happened was an event. It required presence, attention, a particular history and nervous system and the fact that one had not slept and was therefore in a state of unusual openness. It required the temperature of the air and the smell of the lake and the distant sound of a streetcar. It required time—not the frozen instant of a photograph but the unfolding duration of the light changing. If any of these elements had been absent, the beauty would not have occurred.

The sunrise was not beautiful. The sunrise and the observer, together, in that moment, participated in beauty. The beauty was not a property. It was a relation.

This is not mysticism. This is phenomenology. And it changes everything.

II. The Collector's Error

The Western tradition has spent two and a half millennia treating beauty as a property of objects. Plato located it in the realm of Forms: there is an ideal Beauty, and beautiful things participate in it to varying degrees. Aristotle grounded it in proportion and order: beauty is a matter of measurable relationships between parts. The tradition that followed—through Aquinas, through the Renaissance, through Kant—debated the nature of this property, but rarely questioned whether it was a property at all.

This metaphysics had consequences. If beauty is a property, then beautiful things can be collected. They can be owned. They can be removed from their contexts and accumulated in private hands. The history of the art market is the history of this assumption: that a painting's beauty travels with it, that it remains beautiful whether it hangs in a Florentine church or a Swiss freeport, that beauty is portable, extractable, possessable.

The collector believes that by acquiring beautiful objects, one acquires beauty itself. The museum believes that by accumulating beautiful objects, it becomes a treasury of beauty. The logic seems self-evident. And yet something goes wrong.

Consider the butterfly. Alive, in flight, glimpsed in a garden: beautiful. Killed, pinned, labeled, mounted under glass: still beautiful? The same word is used, but it describes something different. The specimen retains the colors, the patterns, the formal properties that made the living creature beautiful. But the beauty has departed. What remains is a record, a souvenir, a proof that beauty once occurred here. The collector possesses the husk.

The error is understandable. There is a desire to hold onto what moves us, to keep it, return to it, possess it. But beauty is not that kind of thing. It is not a thing at all.

III. The Shoreline Knows

The Toronto Biennial has, since its founding, taken the shoreline as its organizing principle. Not the city, not the institution, not the white cube, but the edge where land meets water. This is a curatorial choice with philosophical implications.

A shoreline is not a line. It is a zone. It belongs to neither land nor water but to the relationship between them. It changes with the tides, the seasons, the centuries. It is a place of constant negotiation, where two systems meet and intermingle without either one conquering the other. To stand on a shoreline is to stand in a space of relation.

The Indigenous peoples who have lived along the shores of Lake Ontario for thousands of years understood this. The Anishinaabe concept of mino-bimaadiziwin—often translated as "the good life" but more accurately understood as "living well in relation"—does not separate the human from the land, the individual from the community, the present from the ancestors. Beauty, in this framework, is not a property of objects but a quality of relationships. A thing is beautiful when it is in right relation: to its materials, to its makers, to its users, to the land from which it came.

This is not a romanticization of Indigenous knowledge. It is a recognition that Western aesthetics is not the only aesthetics, and that other traditions have developed sophisticated understandings of beauty that challenge our assumptions. When Candice Hopkins, the Carcross/Tagish First Nation curator who has shaped the Toronto Biennial's vision, speaks of "beginning with the land," she is not making a sentimental gesture. She is proposing an alternative metaphysics.

IV. The Violence of Extraction

If beauty is relational, then extraction is not merely theft. It is destruction.

The Benin bronzes provide an instructive case. The standard argument for their return is that they were stolen, that they belong to Nigeria, that justice requires restitution. This argument is correct. But it does not go far enough.

The bronzes were not merely objects that happened to be located in Benin City. They were nodes in a web of relationships: to the Oba who commissioned them, to the artisans who cast them, to the ancestors they depicted, to the rituals in which they functioned, to the architecture that housed them, to the community that understood their meanings. Their beauty was not portable. It was situated. It depended on the relationships that surrounded them.

When the British took the bronzes, they did not merely relocate beautiful objects. They severed the relationships that constituted the beauty. They extracted the objects from the web of meaning that made them what they were. What arrived in London was not the same thing that had existed in Benin. It was a remnant, a fragment, a beautiful corpse.

The bronzes in the British Museum are still visually striking. They still activate the reward centers of the brain. But the beauty—if one understands beauty as relational—has been damaged. The relationships have been broken. What one experiences in the museum is not beauty but the memory of beauty, the evidence that beauty once existed, the ghost.

The honest museum would acknowledge this. It would present its collection not as a treasury of beauty but as an archive of interrupted relationships.

V. The Beloved

There is a domain where this understanding already holds, though we rarely connect it to aesthetics: the domain of love.

When one finds another person beautiful, we do not typically mean that they possess certain measurable properties that trigger our reward centers. We mean something more complex, more particular, more relational. We mean that in their presence, in our attention to them, something occurs that one can only call beauty. Their face becomes beautiful to us, in a way that may be invisible to others. The beauty is not in them alone, nor in us alone, but in the space between.

This is why photographs of the beloved are never adequate. The photograph captures the properties but not the relation. It freezes what was alive. People keep the photographs anyway, because they remind us of the beauty, but we know they are not the beauty itself. The beauty required presence, attention, the unfolding of time, the vulnerability of encounter.

And this is why possession destroys love. The lover who tries to possess the beloved, who tries to fix them in place, who tries to extract their beauty and keep it, finds that the beauty disappears. What remains is a person reduced to an object, a butterfly pinned to a board. Possession is the opposite of relation. It kills what it tries to preserve.

The wisdom traditions have always known this. "If you love something, let it go." "To have and to hold" is a vow, not a description—an ongoing commitment, not a completed acquisition. Love is a practice, not a possession. And if beauty is like love—if beauty is relational in the way that love is relational—then beauty too must be practiced rather than possessed.

VI. Stewardship

If beauty cannot be possessed, what is one's relationship to it? Consider the word: stewardship.

A steward does not own. A steward tends. A steward recognizes that they are responsible for something that is not theirs, that was here before them and will be here after them, that belongs to a larger story than their own life. The steward's relationship to the thing in their care is not one of possession but of service.

Indigenous land practices offer a model. In many Indigenous frameworks, land is not property to be owned but a relation to be maintained. The human community is responsible to the land, responsible for passing it on to future generations in a condition of health. The land is not a resource to be extracted but a relative to be respected. The concept of "ownership" in the European sense is not merely absent; it is incoherent. How can one own one's mother?

What would it mean to relate to beauty in this way? Not to possess beautiful things but to tend the conditions in which beauty can occur? Not to collect beauty but to cultivate it? Not to extract and store but to nurture and release?

The gardener understands this. The gardener does not possess the garden. The gardener creates conditions: prepares the soil, plants the seeds, waters and weeds and waits. The beauty that emerges belongs to no one. It is an event, a collaboration between human intention and natural process. The gardener's joy is not the joy of possession but the joy of participation.

This is what the observer experienced at dawn on the Toronto shoreline. One did not possess the beauty of the sunrise. One participated in it. One was a condition of its occurrence, as the light and the water and the temperature were conditions. For those few minutes, one was a steward of one's own attention, offering it to something larger than oneself. And then the moment passed, and the beauty dispersed, and what remained was nothing but the memory and the gratitude.

VII. The Mud-Soaked Banks

Let us return to the Biennial, because we have been speaking abstractly and the Biennial is wonderfully concrete.

The works in this year's edition are dispersed across the city, many of them sited along the waterfront and the ravine systems that thread through Toronto like veins. To experience the Biennial is to walk. It is to leave the controlled environment of the gallery and enter the uncontrolled environment of the city. It is to encounter art in places where art is not expected: under bridges, beside highways, in parks where homeless people sleep, on shores where the water smells of algae and industry.

This is a curatorial argument. It says: beauty does not require the white cube. It says: beauty can occur in the mud-soaked banks, in the places we have neglected and polluted, in the zones of transition and abandonment. It says: perhaps beauty is more likely to occur in these places, because they have not been sanitized into the frictionless environments of consumption.

An afternoon spent with an installation beneath a highway overpass provides the evidence. The noise was tremendous. The smell was diesel and wet concrete. The light was the gray-green light of a place that never sees direct sun. None of the conditions that we associate with aesthetic experience were present. And yet: beauty occurred. It occurred because the artist had attended to this place, had spent time with it, had learned its rhythms and responded to them. It occurred because the visitor, too, was willing to attend, to stay, to let the place unfold rather than passing through it on the way to somewhere else.

This is what the shoreline teaches. Beauty is not a destination. It is not a thing to be reached and possessed. It is a quality of relation that can occur anywhere, under any conditions, if one is willing to be present to it.

VIII. The Uncomfortable Implications

If beauty is relational, then the entire infrastructure of the art world—the market, the museum, the collection, the auction—is built on a misunderstanding.

This observation comes without pleasure. Many have spent careers within this infrastructure. Many have benefited from it. Many have enjoyed its pleasures and participated in its rituals. But if one is serious about the question of beauty, one must follow the argument where it leads.

The art market treats artworks as commodities: objects that can be bought, sold, and stored, whose value is a function of their scarcity and their provenance. This makes sense if beauty is a property that inheres in objects. But if beauty is relational, then what the market trades is not beauty but the potential for beauty: objects that might, under the right conditions, participate in aesthetic experience. The collector who buys a painting does not acquire its beauty; they acquire the opportunity to enter into relation with it. And if the painting goes into a freeport, if it is treated as a financial instrument rather than a partner in encounter, then even that opportunity is foreclosed.

The museum, likewise, presents itself as a treasury of beauty. But if beauty is relational, then the museum is something more modest: a space where encounters can occur. Its value lies not in what it contains but in what it enables. A museum that facilitates genuine encounter—that slows visitors down, that creates conditions for attention, that acknowledges the contexts from which its objects were extracted—serves beauty. A museum that processes tourists, that encourages the photograph over the experience, that treats artworks as content to be consumed—that museum has confused the remnant for the relation.

And the biennale? The biennale is a temporary autonomous zone, a space carved out of the ordinary operations of the market, where other kinds of relation become possible. At its best, the biennale offers encounters that could not occur anywhere else: site-specific works, durational performances, collaborations between artists and communities, art that cannot be bought because it cannot be moved. At its worst, the biennale is a trade fair, a networking opportunity, a spectacle that processes attention as efficiently as the algorithm.

The Toronto Biennial, to its credit, seems aware of this tension. By dispersing its works across the city, by siting them in places that cannot be controlled, by emphasizing process over product and relation over object, it is attempting to practice what a relational aesthetics might look like. Whether it succeeds is for each visitor to determine, in the privacy of their own encounter.

IX. What Cannot Be Owned

There is a freedom in this. If beauty cannot be possessed, then it cannot be taken from us.

The collector can hoard objects, but they cannot hoard beauty. The museum can accumulate artifacts, but the beauty remains outside, waiting for the next encounter. The market can price and trade and speculate, but beauty slips through its fingers. Beauty belongs to no one, which means it is available to everyone.

The prisoner in the bare cell, tending a small garden, participates in beauty that the warden cannot confiscate. The child in the windowless school, drawing with a crayon on scrap paper, enters a relation that the budget cuts cannot foreclose. The person scrolling through the feed, if they stop, if they step outside, if they attend to even one thing long enough for it to unfold—that person has access to beauty that no algorithm can monetize.

This is not to diminish the arguments of previous months. Beauty deprivation is real. Structural conditions make beauty more or less accessible. The person in the environment of ugliness must work harder to find beauty than the person in the environment of care. Injustice is injustice. But within the constraints, within even the most impoverished conditions, the capacity for relation remains. Beauty is resilient because it is not a thing. It is an event, and events can occur anywhere.

This is, perhaps, why tyrants fear art. Not because art speaks truth to power, though sometimes it does. But because art models a kind of relation—attentive, open, receptive, free—that tyranny cannot tolerate. The subject who has learned to enter into relation with beauty has practiced a form of freedom that no authority can fully control. They have learned that the most valuable things cannot be owned. They have become, in a small way, ungovernable.

X. The Practice

To conclude: something practical is needed, because this column has been more abstract than usual.

If beauty is relational, then beauty is a practice. It is something one does, not something one has. It is a discipline of attention, a commitment to presence, a willingness to be changed by what one encounters.

Here is what the practice looks like. It looks like slowing down. It looks like staying with something past the point of comfort, past the point where the restless mind wants to move on. It looks like asking not "Is this beautiful?" but "What kind of attention does this ask of me?" It looks like noticing what one is inclined to pass by, and pausing anyway. It looks like walking to the water before dawn and standing there until the light changes.

The practice does not require museums or biennales. It does not require wealth or education or access. It requires only the willingness to be present, to offer attention, to enter into relation with whatever is in front of us. A crack in the sidewalk. A stranger's face. The pattern of light on a wall. The ordinary world is saturated with opportunities for beauty, if one is willing to meet them.

This is not mysticism. This is not a retreat from the political arguments of the previous months. It is their completion. If beauty is constructed, then one can construct it. If beauty deprivation is violence, then one can resist by cultivating beauty in unlikely places. If beauty is relational, then one can practice relation. One is not a passive recipient of aesthetic experience. One is a participant in its creation.

The shoreline is everywhere.

The inquiry continues.