THE DRAWING BOARD.(various artists, drawings, Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York)

The dryly titled "Drawing Now: Eight Propositions," a show at the Museum of Modern Art, in Queens, is a trailblazing event for an art world that has sorely needed one. Laura Hoptman, the curator of the exhibition, which runs until January 6th, has sorted out a quiet but potent development of the last decade by focussing on an international array of twenty-six young but established artists of many tendencies. Her selections vary in quality, but even some of the weaker elements testify that artists are beginning to reconceive their vocation around the humble disciplines of pencil, pen, or brush on paper. She tacitly rejects the flabby creed of academic avant-gardism, which defines "art" as anything that an art institution chooses to exhibit, thus rendering the term so nebulous that judging it, other than as entertainment or politics, is a fool's errand. Although "Drawing Now" may be eclectic to a fault and indulgent of wacky formats--pointlessly large ones, in some cases--it affirms that a search is on for renewed standards of mastery, validity, and eloquence in a medium that has been the bedrock of visual art since the draftsmen of Lascaux.

What does it mean to make drawings in an age of myriad image technologies? My two favorite artists in the show, John Currin and Elizabeth Peyton, answer that it's a personal enterprise, played out on a public stage for an audience that isn't limited to the living. Currin's fantasies of winsome, sexy sylphs and his satiric faux portraits of haplessly neurotic contemporary men and women provide startling encounters with art history. A virtuoso, Currin competitively evokes both Old Masters such as Cranach and Watteau and their debased legacies in popular illustration. It's easy to characterize his work as perverse and decadent, but what else, on the current scene, affords pleasures so savory and overflowing? Peyton likewise risks categorical contempt by making art for pleasure's sake, with ostensibly languid but breathtakingly assured drawings in colored pencil and runny watercolor of ultra-pretty, pouty friends. Honest adoration is her bulwark, which proves as tough as stone. Her memorials to youthful romantic longing are fresh and timeless.

Hoptman groups Currin and Peyton in one of her "propositions" (she calls it "Fashion and Likeness"), along with a Scotsman, Graham Little, who meticulously draws female fashion models wearing, or glumly enduring, Gucci, Prada, and other big-name duds. Lacking Currin's wit and Peyton's passion, the Scottish artist generates a brittle melancholy that points up the sharper authenticity of his New York mates. Something similar happens repeatedly, if not so dramatically, throughout the show, as a viewer's powers of discrimination are called into play. Nothing could be further from the festivalist pluralism of so many contemporary group exhibitions (Documenta, the Whitney Biennial) that pat the darling tousled heads of all artists equally.

The last heyday of drawing was during the early nineteen-seventies, when the post-minimalist buzzword was "process." The likes of Sol LeWitt and Bruce Nauman manifested thought in action with conceptual projects and what looked like glorified napkin sketches by engineers. They tipped drawing away from the sensuousness of painting, toward the rationality of design and architecture. Several of Hoptman's propositions, such as "Architectural Drafting" and "Visionary Architecture," signal the belated arrival of a countermovement in which professional-looking draftsmanship is infused with sheer aestheticism and the bizarre. The London artist Paul Noble bids to be the M. C. Escher of our day in obsessively detailed visions of nightmare cities, whose forms may double as block-lettered messages. Matthew Ritchie, a fabulist of science with an ardent following, depicts the creation and evolution of life in large, bravura diagrams executed on plastic in pencil and colored ink. They quickly ...