Beauty: In Some Recent Art

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.

Michael Bracewell is the author of seven novels and four works of non-fiction, including most recently Souvenir: London 1979 - 1986 (2021) and Unfinished Business (2023). He has written widely on visual art, pop music and popular culture, including Bridget Riley: Paintings and Related Work (National Gallery, London, 2010) and a monograph, Modern World: The Art of Richard Hamilton (art/books, 2020). He has published interviews with many musicians, including Nina Simone, Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Lisa-Marie Presley, He was also a contributor to The Rise of David Bowie, 1972–1973, with Mick Rock and Barney Hoskyns (Taschen, 2016). A selection of Bracewell's writings on art, The Space Between was published by Ridinghouse in 2012. More recently he contributed the Introduction to a new edition of Oscar Wilde's classic essay The Critic As Artist first published in 1891 (David Zwirner Books, 2019). Charles Asprey has been working with artists since the early 1990s. He is the founder of Picpus Press, an influential arts journal, and co-founded Ridinghouse in 1995 as a publishing house. He has produced several monographs with emerging artists: Scrapheap Services by Michael Landy (1995); Teenage Pantomime by Antje Majewski (2002); Tenant of Culture (with Soft-Opening, 2020); A.B. with Amelia Barratt (2022).