NEW ART FROM LONDON

Taking readers to the heart of British contemporary visual culture, this incisive and provocative survey will be essential reading for anyone involved in or interested in art and its relationship to everyday life. After a decade of art revolving around sensation and celebrity, New Art from London identifies the emergence of a more mature and motivated strain of artists. Although they are far from being a coherent generation with a manifesto, their work suggests, along with irony, wit and intelligence, a new sense of seriousness about art in Britain. London is now as much a city within a global network as it is a part of Britain, and at the heart of this study is an overarching concern with the way in which the art made there is now less representative of national culture and more plugged into a cosmopolitan, international network of art-making and -selling. The artists featured, most of whom are still in their thirties, are concerned about their practices, returning to aesthetic issues and discovering new perspectives on the older debates of modernism.