Tracey Emin on art writing: "Everyone waiting to stick the knife in" (2002)
Via Tracey Emin’s experience, to what extent is today’s artwriting riddled with factual errors and underlying motive by writers, journalists, and academics? And from a real research perspective, if we can’t figure out Tracey Emin today, how can we expect to really understand artists of the past?
The following are excerpts from an interview of Tracey Emin in her studio in 2001.
R.J. Preece: You are in a unique, high-profile, art-and-media career position. In many ways, you are overly examined and questioned.
Tracey Emin: It’s called “everyone waiting to stick the knife in,” waiting for you to fall.
[...]
R.J. Preece: What do you think about the writings on your work?
Tracey Emin: I think it’s people paying for their mortgages and paying for their mistresses by writing any old crap about me.
R.J. Preece: Do you read things that are completely factually off?
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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.
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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.
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.
[...]
R.J. Preece: I pulled some quotes out of your press clippings. I can show them to you if you’d like.
Tracey Emin: You could cheat and make some up to see if I remember them.
Tracey Emin on art writing: 1 | 2
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