Tracey Emin on art writing: "Everyone waiting to stick the knife in" (2002)
R.J. Preece: (Laughs.) Miranda Sawyer quotes you and writes: “I know people went to laugh at my bed and to jeer at it. Still,” sniffs Tracey, “at least they actually went to see it.”
Tracey Emin: Because of the amount of press attention, people went to see this dirty bed, as if it was a freak show. But when they got there, they saw something else—the bed, stuff on the walls, whatever. For the Tate, it’s the highest attendance they ever received for the Turner Prize show. There was a massive queue, and when you got into my bit, you couldn’t move.
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R.J. Preece: The Sawyer piece also quotes you as saying: “I don’t understand why people are nasty to me.”
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Click the photo to see a sample of nine Tracey Emin quotes— and 69 media placements.
Tracey Emin: I don’t know why. But that quote was picked up by the press brilliantly. You know that “quote of the week” in newspapers? That was one of them. It’s like some art critic who should know better. He writes about my work, putting me and my work down, but then he writes in this bad-cockney way, with affectations in the writing, trying to mimic how I speak.
R.J. Preece: I’ve been thinking, there’s also a British cultural context— in addition to the media context— shaping these writings on your work, and this won’t always be clear to international readers. In one clipping, I read: “Her accent isn’t from Marlborough, it’s from Margate.” I heard later that a Marlborough accent is posh and public school. It strikes me as really odd to frame it in such a way, and what exactly is a Margate accent?
Tracey Emin: In America, they have words like “white trash.” That’s what is meant. They’re saying that I’m very common. With my accent, I’m not supposed to be intelligent. There have been a lot of newspaper articles, maybe hundreds, and the majority of women writers actually take an angle on it, or they try to go into it. With a lot of the men, however, they can be complementary, flattering, or lively. They’re gushing on how much they like me. Sometimes, it’s a bit embarrassing.
Then there are these other men. It’s like this: you’ve worked hard all of your life, you went to Oxford, and you’ve done this and that, and you’re an art critic. Your job is to unravel the “secret” or whatever, and you come across an entity like me. It’s going to piss you off. Because there’s no great secret, what you see is what you get, and anyone can understand what I’m doing. So, it’s almost like I make this critic-person redundant, just by my attitude, and they resent me for that.
It’s that simple.
Click to read the full interview of Tracey Emin.
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