Tracey Emin :
Art, artist and media coverage (2002)
A Q&A with the "bad girl" of British art.
Tracey Emin interview: Art, artist and media coverage 2/6
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Click the photo to see an excerpt of an article incorrectly mentioning Tracey Emin — and the newspaper’s retraction that followed.
R.J. Preece: Do you read things that are completely factually off?
Tracey Emin: Totally. I could go to a newspaper, and I could sue them for defamation of character, for destroying, well not destroying, my career, but trying to corrupt my career or whatever. Quite easily.
R.J. Preece: Then why don’t you?
Tracey Emin: Because I’m bigger than all that. What’s in yesterday’s newspaper is today’s fish-and-chip paper. If it really affects my life so badly, so personally, then I would.
When it’s really out of order, or something possibly detrimental to my family, or I’m driven to such a level that I know that this can be picked up and repeated again, I will just write or e-mail the newspaper editor. So, in the next day’s newspaper, it might say, “Tracey Emin says this is factually incorrect.”
R.J. Preece: So that’s happening a bit, and I’m not seeing it in your press clippings.
Tracey Emin: Yes, because it might be in next week’s newspaper. But it doesn’t always hurt me. It hurt me when it was going on for four months during the Turner Prize (1999). Four months of being told that your work is shit by all different people was quite difficult, because I know my work isn’t shit. I know that I was a scapegoat. What was being said about me personally was unbearable. The stuff the press gets—I mean like ex-boyfriends selling stories to newspapers or being doorstepped by journalists leading up to the Turner Prize. My mum being telephoned all the time.
With my last show I did six interviews, but those six got diverted and split into, maybe, every single newspaper. That often happens: I haven’t done an interview or given any images, but, with paparazzi photos, the photos look recent and then they put the whole interview together. So, it looks like a new article, and it’s big—when I actually haven’t had anything to do with it.
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Click the photo to see a clip of Tracey Emin during the live Turner Prize 1997 show.
R.J. Preece: I saw you on television after Gillian Wearing won the Turner Prize in 1997, on a live post-Prize talk show. Your drunken behavior, resulting in your storming off the set, has become part of your history. What do you think about that now?
Tracey Emin: I didn’t even know I was doing it. I was so drunk, I have no memory that I was there. I thought I was around at someone’s house. But I wasn’t rude or offensive to anybody. And I didn’t have a problem—just getting out of that boring talk. I’d heard I was swearing, and I thought, Christ, how embarrassing. My friend made me watch it about six months later, and I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The only fuss was that I was a woman, drunk on television, who didn’t have a problem.
R.J. Preece: Do you think fame helps or hurts your work?
Tracey Emin interview : Art, artist and media coverage - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 - the unmade bed | 5 | 6 - the tent
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