In 1999 the artist and art critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe published the now classic Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. The book was an alternative history of art and its relationship to technology and an argument for the return of beauty in contemporary art. It was seen as part of a whole wave of books advocating the revival of aesthetics in the wake of postmodernism. Gilbert-Rolfe's book was
unusual, however, in that it made its case using the same French theory as the postmodernism it opposed. Art after Deconstruction continues Gilbert-Rolfe's argument for the return of aesthetics in contemporary art.