On sustainable fashion, the limits of consciousness, and why changing what you buy is not enough but is still where you have to start? The phrase "sustainable fashion" has a problem, and the problem is that it has become a category. Once something becomes a category, it becomes a market segment. Once it becomes a market segment, it becomes something to be targeted, branded, positioned, and sold. And once it is sold, it has completed the very circuit it claimed to interrupt. The irony is neat...

On art, objects, and the radical act of making something that serves no purpose There is a particular kind of anxiety that greets anything that cannot be explained by its function. We live in a culture that has made utility its highest virtue, a culture that measures value in outputs, efficiencies, returns on investment. And yet we keep making things paintings, sculptures, songs, novels, dresses that no one strictly needs that produce nothing, solve nothing, feed no one. Art is the standing...

On surface, depth, and why the distinction between them is much less stable than we have been led to believe The word superficial is an insult. This is so well established that its origin the Latin superficies, meaning surface barely registers. To call someone superficial is to say they live on the outside of things, that they are taken in by appearances, that they lack the depth to see past what is immediately visible to what is really there. It is the accusation most reliably leveled at...