Their detractors think that in conceptual art Beuys had said all there was to be said by 1979

Their detractors think that, in conceptual art, Beuys had said all there was to be said by 1979. They are not linked by style so much as sensibility and basic front. Some are concerned with conveying honest truths about the human body, usually their own; some are pushing boundaries by using video, film, photography, performance art and pop music; and the majority are linked by a fixation with the works and attitude of past art-jesters, especially Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamps and Andy Warhol. Other members are Gavin Turk, Itai Doran, Marcus Harvey, Marcus Taylor, Marc Quinn, Gary Hume, John Frankland, Brad Lochore, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger and Sarah Lucas The first six of these are represented by Jay Jopling. This, as Joplin says, is how "it" happens.Emin is happening at a time when a breath of optimism is enlivening the British art market. Young artists are winning prestigious prizes both here and abroad; European gallereries are opening in London; youthful work, exposed by the Saatchi Collection and the progressive Serpentine Gallery, is being taken seriously; and curators and gallery owners are seemingly more enlightened.The contemporary art gang is led by Damien Hirst, partly because he is genuinely respected, and partly because his talents extend to an acute understanding of the media.

The prestigious American magazine, Art Forum, recently devoted two pages to her, describing her as "Sandra Bernhard and [Joseph] Beuys rolled into one". Her drawings - beautiful, scratchy, violent, naive - are selling for pounds 600 each. This year, at the group show "Minky Manky" in London, she exhibited the memorable "Everybody I've Ever Slept With:1963-1995", a tent inscribed with the names of all her ex-boyfriends Art Stardom now beckons. "I thought it was a bit stupid." Emin said that, if he gave her pounds 10, she would send him three letters, one marked personal. "A month later," says Jopling, "I got this extraordinary letter, telling me about the most personal things in her life, about her abortion - it was almost embarrassing to read it." They swapped ideas - and Emin had her first show at the White Cube gallery in 1993.In 1994, Jopling took her to America where, as a part of an art-fair in New York, Emin sat in a bed wearing a negligee at the Gramercy Park Hotel The dealer sold her bedspread for pounds 2,560.

The reason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of 14, was because they weren't men They were less Less than human. They were pathetic...Tracey Emin remembers meeting Jopling at a dinner party for the gallery owner Tanya Gruner He had his glasses thrust up his nose "It's a trick he can do," she says. He watches through big, black-framed specs, his silence discouraging speech, his smile gleeful. Images of Margate appear, then Emin, in little-girl tones, describes her life: I remember the first time some one asked me to grab their balls I remember the power it gave me It wasn't always like that. Sometimes they would just come.Then they would leave me there, wherever I was, half-naked "I love this bit," Jopling interrupts.

Jopling, six foot three, Gilbert and George-style suit (no qualms about wearing brown in town), flicks it on to his television set. To date, the Indian army has captured over 1,700 Kalashnikov assault rifles, 150 rocket-launchers, 1,000 anti-personnel mines, and innumerable grenades. That is only a fraction of the firepower still in the hands of separatist rebels who are in revolt against Indian rule in Kashmir. And of course, there's always the option of kidnapping. Two Britons, an American, a German, and a Norwegian, all tourists, were captured in early July by rebels while trekking leisurely through Pahalgam, a steep mountain valley with forests of fir and birch cut through by waterfalls.

Paradise.At gunpoint, the hostages were forced to march day and night along precipices of loose shale and dizzying 16,000 foot mountain passes, according to John Childs, an American engineer who managed to slip away on the fourth evening of his captivity while his captors slept At that altitude lightning storms menace as do blizzards Temperatures at night drop to freezing. The kidnappers spoke no English, Childs explained, so it was impossible for the captives to communicate whether they were ill or suffering from high altitude sickness. The Himalayan terrain is formidable enough to make even an experienced alpinist tremble.Worse still, if the government refuses to comply with the demands of kidnappers - in this case that 21 jailed militant leaders be released - there is a danger that their captives will be picked off one by one and executed. Or that they will be caught in crossfire if the army attempt a rescue.How was it that the two Britons - Keith Mangan, 33, from Tooting, and Paul Wells, 23, from Nottingham - and their fellow prisoners came to be seized on a faraway Himalayan mountain by Islamic rebels who call themselves the "Al-Faran" group, after a tribe of mountain warriors in Arabia? They are not spies or heroes; Britain was jostled out of the Great Game in Asia nearly half a century ago. They are simple travellers: Mr Mangan an electrician who sold his business so that he could spend a year travelling the world with Julie, his wife; Mr Wells a young photography student.Despite warnings from the Foreign Office not to visit Kashmir, its legendary beauty continues to draw British travellers - at their peril. Kashmir has moved poets and saints to ecstasy, and iron-hearted conquerors like the Moghul, Akbar, to poetry.