Carefully executed and highly finished, the drawings explored in this book— which accompanied an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 2002—are largely representational and descriptive, sometimes with an interest in story-telling. Some show affinities with illustration, fashion, or comic strips; others are closer to industrial and commercial varieties of precision drawing, such as architectural plans and scientific renderings; still others take ideas from the traditions of ornament. In technique, medium, size, and imagery, the works in Drawing Now are dynamically various, but there is an impulse they share: they are not sealed inside the realms of aesthetics and theory but refer to the languages of the life around us, communicating information, telling stories, creating scenarios, and conjuring newly imagined worlds. The art of drawing flourished in the 1990s, and broke significantly from the tenets of twentieth-century modernism. Drawing Now: Eight Propositions surveys this new work, and shows drawing as no less adventurous and aesthetically satisfying than any of the more recent and seemingly more current methods of artmaking today. 192 pp.; 130 illus.