Tracey Emin : Art and Celebrity excerpts (2003)
Now onto the queen of art + celebrity from John A. Walker’s book.
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Tracey Emin UK tabloid coverage sample around My bed. Click the image to see a music journalism interpretation of Tracey Emin’s darker media coverage, featuring Stephen Mallinder of the legendary Cabaret Voltaire band.
During the 1990s, Tracey Emin became as famous in Britain as Damien Hirst when interviews, gossip items, satires, caricatures and photographs proliferated in the press, in fashion and art magazines and on the Internet. She also appeared on television several times and, like Hirst, was honoured by television arts editor Melvyn Bragg when, in 2001, he devoted a South Bank Show to her. Like Hirst, Emin paid no heed to the traditional stereotype of the English: being modest, polite, liking privacy and suffering adversity with a stiff upper lip.
Tracey Emin’s life story is known in some detail, mainly because she herself has made it the subject of so much of her art, which has therefore been called “confessional”, “angry vagina” and “victim art”. (It could also be called “me, me, me art” and “misery art”.) She is an artist who has taken the commodification of the self to a new extreme. Emin has used art galleries to confess her sins the way Catholics use confession booths. As many television programmes and autobiographies testify, the willingness of people to confess all in public—especially experiences of childhood abuse— has become very widespread in recent years. (There is one subject celebrities are generally reticent about: their personal finances.) However, one of Emin’s photographs comments ironically on the relation between money and her body. It shows her sitting on the floor naked pushing banknotes between her thighs with coins in front of her. Its title is: I’ve Got it All (2000).
Unlike Madonna or Sherman, Tracey Emin does not adopt fictional personae or masks. In her case, it seems there is no artifice, only authenticity. She concluded a Radio 4 interview in July 2001 by insisting: “I am genuine.” Sincerity by itself, however, is no guarantee of high quality art.
Tracey Emin was born in London in 1963 but grew up in the downmarket seaside resort of Margate. Its only previous claim to fame in terms of visual art was that J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) lived and worked there at various times. (Margate plans to open a Turner Centre in 2004 to attract more visitors.) One of Emin’s nicknames is “Mad Tracey from Margate” and she once remarked angrily: “I grew up in Margate and somebody’s going to FUCKING PAY FOR IT.” By birth, she was only half English: her father, Enver Emin, was a Turkish-Cypriot chef and hotel manager with black African ancestors. Pamela Cashin, her mother, was an English chambermaid. Both were married to other people when they met; they lived together for seven years. Enver, a lothario, is proud of his many sexual conquests and love children. Emin’s stepmother currently assists her by sewing her quilts. Emin has a twin brother Paul who complains about the publicity that she has attracted to the family and he has dismissed her art as “a load of bollocks”.
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