Tracey Emin : Art and celebrity excerpts

ADP magazine 1(5): This is the new shit! | Published 14 December 2009
Page 7 of 7

Tracey Emin. You forgot to kiss my soul, (2001). Neon, 45 1/2 x 55 5/16".

Negative opinions have included: “thin gruel”, “household junk”, “drawings a terrible cliché”, “drama queen”, “she has become a bore”, “tortured nonsense”. Jonathan Jones, in contrast, praised Tracey Emin’s solo show, You Forgot to Kiss My Soul, at White Cube 2 gallery in April 2001 for being gentle, passionate and poetic. One exhibit was a tall wooden reconstruction of a Helter Skelter ride reminiscent of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. In this instance, the reference was not to Russian constructivism but to Emin’s seaside childhood. The structure was a rather obvious metaphor: a downward spiral. Her life, as one of her statements put it, had been “Hellter Fucking Skelter”.

Since certain collectors queue up to pay high prices for her art and some dealers and curators are keen to exhibit it around the world, and publishers are happy to pay her large advances (she has a contract to write a novel), it is obvious they value her work despite the negative critical opinions. When such criticisms were repeated on a television arts review programme, a female panellist remarked: “She’s not a terribly good artist, but I think she’s a fantastic phenomenon”, thereby implying that conventional aesthetic criteria did not apply in her case. David Lee observed in similar vein: “Tracey is not an artist but she is an amazing force of nature”. Critic Richard Dorment thought she was “the Queen of No-brow—that indeterminate middle ground between highbrow culture and lowbrow entertainment where questions such as ’Is she any good?’ simply don’t apply”. Again, as in the case of David Hockney, there is a discrepancy between the degree of fame Emin enjoys and the merit of her art. However, since life and art are so closely intertwined in Emin’s case, perhaps critic Laura Cumming was right when she remarked: “performance is what she does best: dramatising, and now sending herself up...”

Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst were the most prominent artists of the YBA or BritArt generation and so they deserve to be the central characters of any future feature film about that generation. In January 2001, the celebrity website Peoplenews.com reported that a biopic of the YBAs was in development and named John Maybury as a possible director. The movie would “reveal their lives before they became famous, the incestuous relationships within the group and their excessive drink and drug consumption... the corrupting influence of fame...” Will Hirst and Emin be invited, one wonders, to play themselves?

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