This book comprises a timely and controversial assertion of beauty as vital to the energy of contemporary art. As such it surveys work by an international group of artists who share an intense and highly individualistic focus on the processes of making, authorship and aesthetic poise. An essay by Michael Bracewell shares with its subjects the return of aesthetics to the science of feelings; to the individual as opposed to ‘identity’; and to a sensibility in visual art that is literary, flees the stereotype and rejects sociopolitical verbiage. It is a concept of beauty in some recent art that is less about representation than it is about memoir, fictional devices, cultural connoisseurship as praxis and the profundity of human relationships.