Her other signature work, “Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995”, from 1995, fared little better. A camping tent with the names of her lovers sewn inside, it was a sardonic riff on the art historical tradition of the mausoleum and war memorial. But even the softly-spoken Martin Gayford, biographer of Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Constable and others, politely suggested it was “pretty nondescript to look at”. Members of the public joined in. The BBC reported that a South Wales housewife, Christine de Ville from Swansea, drove 200 miles to London to the Turner Prize show in 1999 and attempted to tidy up Tracey’s bed.

There was no let-up. In 2003, Spectator art critic Philip Hensher described Emin as “thick”, “half-witted” and “gormless”. With her copious artworks about her libido, abortions and masturbation, it was easy to slag her off for being a slag. She had a semi-famous boyfriend, Billy Childish, who was a Stuckist, and it was a miracle no one called her a Sluttist. Perhaps it was only Charles Saatchi and a few others who noticed that in “My Bed”, Emin had taken the classic still-life painting and reimagined it as a real-life installation, artfully arranged, meanwhile channeling Marcel Duchamp’s early 20th-century invention of the “readymade” artwork — the urinal, wine rack, bicycle wheel on a stool, etc — in tongue-in-cheek fashion. Here was an “unmade”. Saatchi bought the bed for £150,000 and reputedly set it up in his own dining room.

And now, look how far we have come. Emin is the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern — and note that this is Tate Modern, not Tate Britain, where the apparently lesser Cornelia Parker and Sarah Lucas had their retrospectives. Tate Modern tends to be where the foremost contemporary artists have their grand surveys, including Damien Hirst at the height of his influence in 2012.

Further reading

The triumph of anti-art

By Sam Jennings

The art critics have duly changed their tune. In a review of her 2011 exhibition at the Hayward, Searle found “a far greater range of tempos and registers of feeling than we might expect”. In 2024, in a video made by her gallery, Jay Jopling’s White Cube, Gayford called her “a painter absolutely at the top of her game”, which I am sure was a sincerely held opinion, rather than one purchased with a check from the gallery. In 2007, Emin was appointed professor at that conservative bastion of the British art establishment, the Royal Academy — only the second woman to attain the position. That same year, she had the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In 2014, that bed was auctioned for £2.5 million at Christie’s. In 2018, she emblazoned the Eurostar station St Pancras with one of her neon sentences, each of which packs a sigh-inducing, or heart-quickening emotional story into one line. “I want my time with you”, this one says. In 2024, she was knighted: it’s Dame Tracey Emin to you now. She’s gone from Enfant Terrible to Grand Dame to national treasure. She is the Lady Di of contemporary art.

All of this makes Emin the most admired and — alongside Hirst — the best known of the YBA generation, the punky Young British Artists who emerged in the Nineties. They were a bunch of brash pop conceptualists mostly from Goldsmiths, who included Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Sarah Lucas. At Goldsmiths, under the tutelage of Michael Craig Martin and Richard Wentworth, they were encouraged to make artworks like adverts and to act as provocateurs. Emin was at one remove from this crowd. She wasn’t at Goldsmiths, she was at the Royal College of Art, by this time an entirely post-graduate institution. Where Goldsmiths emphasized concept, the RCA emphasized craft. Emin found it traditional to the point of alienating. “I felt very lost at the RCA. It was very conservative, non-experimental and non-political.”

In terms of fame and income, she brought up the rear. At the beginning of the Nineties, Hirst was already famous for his formaldehyde animals, cigarette butts and medicine cabinets, the Chapmans for their arrangements of naked mannequins, Gary Hume for supermodels painted with tubs of Dulux, and Wearing for her photos of people holding signs. Emin’s first solo show came in 1993 at White Cube, memorably featuring a crumpled packet of cigarettes that belonged to her dead uncle. However, she only really made a major impact when her tent was shown in Charles Saatchi and Norman Rosenthal’s epoch-defining Sensation show at the Royal Academy in 1997.

Emin wasn’t really part of the great art boom of the YBA era, either. You could buy a Hirst Spot Painting at the beginning of the Nineties for around a grand; by the mid-Nineties, you’d pay almost £30,000; by the early 2000s you could sell it for six figures and in 2008, someone paid a record price of $3.48 million for one at Phillips de Pury & Company in London. Likewise, you could pick up a work by the Chapmans for under £50,000 – but in 2000, Saatchi paid £1 million for an entire exhibition of their work at White Cube. However, Emin came from behind and overtook her rivals on the final stretch. The value of Hirsts in the art market has halved since the 2007 peak of his “Beautiful Inside My Head” auction at Sotheby’s. Few have anything good to say about his recent work, whether it is the paintings full of colorful dots (“Veil Paintings”, 2018), the mock-shipwreck trophies (“Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable”, 2018), or the crypto stunts (“The Currency”, 2021). Little is heard of Gillian Wearing. Reviews of Hume’s shows are dutiful. No one wishes to be reminded of the Chapman’s mannequins of children with genitals attached to their faces in the age of Epstein — so I apologize for reminding everyone. Meanwhile, the reputation of Emin has only grown over the past two decades and her auction prices have done similar. Charles Saatchi bought her bed for £150,000 in 1998, and it sold at auction for £2.5 million in 2014. In February 2005, one of Emin’s paintings went for £722,000 at Christie’s, but in October 2022, it auctioned another for £2.3 million.

Full disclosure: I have long been a fan. In 2009, I reviewed Emin’s hand-drawn animated film of a woman masturbating, “Those Who Suffer Love”, stating that henceforth “no museum exhibition about feminist art, art about the body or sexual identity in art will be complete without this work”. Yes, even in those pre-social-media days, wildly exaggerated statements got you the readers’ attention — but it was my genuine opinion. In those days, with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of youth, I used to think she was good, but now, as I approach dotage, I think she’s Britain’s greatest living artist.

I can hear the disgruntled murmurs of outraged readers, who remember how she appeared drunk on a late-night TV talk show (Is Painting Dead? Channel 4, 1997) or recall reading in various interviews in the 2000s how she had to pop off to the toilet to vomit. And, no doubt, some cynics will put the great Emin reappraisal down to the age of wokeness. It’s because you can’t criticize a public figure like Tracey Emin. She’s a woman from a working class, immigrant background, and a victim of sexual abuse. That’s what explains all the positive reviews her shows have been getting over the past 15 years. Then there is her generous philanthropy in her hometown of Margate, which shields her from negative press. Emin returned there in 2017 to set up her studio. Since then, she’s turned dilapidated buildings into artists’ studios, bought cheap flats for them to live in and funded residencies. Now, she’s building community centers, gyms and restaurants. Other hardened anti-Eminites might put it down to her narrow escape from death. Her bravery is undeniable and who wants to knock a cancer survivor?

But there’s more to Emin than her bravery or philanthropy. She is an artist, not a social worker or medical miracle — and it’s her art that makes her great. In an era when so many contemporary artists have built an entire career on one method, like cast the undersides and insides of things, mentioning no names, there’s a dazzling, restless variety to her work, as the Tate show reveals: paintings, photos, quilts, videos, sculptures (some in bronze, others knocked up with wooden planks and nails), all sharing the same aesthetic of opposites held in tension, tenderness and bolshiness, self-pity and empathy, victim and victor, lust and love.

Suggested reading

Britain’s cliquey art world

By Bruce Clark

Every great artist should be a little ahead of their time, and from today’s perspective, Emin’s self-obsessed, sex-obsessed, confessional art anticipated our era of public intimacy, of sex positivity, of talking about one’s mental health: even of victimhood.

She is unapologetic about enjoying sex, a proto-Charli XCX in this respect, but equally frank about her experiences of rape — a frankness that has, in time, helped to destigmatize other women who have come forward with stories of male sexual violence. The Tate show opens the week after Gisele Pélicot published her memoir about the banality of male sexual violence, and with the horrific details of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual exploitation of young girls still emerging. It includes her video “Why I Never Became a Dancer” (1995), in which she recounts how as a young teenager she had sex with men in their twenties: “the reason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of 14, was because they weren’t men, less, less than human”. Also present is “How it Feels” (1996), about Emin’s experience of abortion.

In short, all the things we used to think were gross about Emin’s art now appear to be intrinsic to and prophetic of the times we live in. But at the same time, unlike most influencers’ TikToks, Emin’s oversharing does not feel curated or calculated. There is a convincing naivety and directness in the stories she tells.

Art critics and historians can rightly complain that there is a shamelessly derivative quality to Emin’s art — as if she were shoplifting tins of postwar artistic formulas from a supermarket shelf. Her collections of framed mementos and sketches are pure Sophie Calle; her quilts fit right in with those of Judy Chicago’s and Faith Ringgold’s; and her neon texts come straight out of the Bruce Nauman playbook. But in each instance, Emin has made them her own. Her paintings are a good example of that. Those drips, mulched nests of brushstrokes and scrappy fields of colors owe an obvious debt to Joan Mitchell and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The ghostly muted palette comes from the Nineties’ “bad painting” movement led by Luc Tuymans. Her brushwork is scrappy, yes, but if you peer at those quick messy lines, they capture emotions, poses and identities. You can often identify distinct outlines of her own face in her wan black brushstrokes, and detect on her face her recurring vocabulary of emotions — sadness, agony, desire. Trust me, it’s quite a skill to appear that clumsy yet communicate with such precision. Not every picture is a winner (nor indeed, every kind of artwork; I don’t care for her blobby sculptures blown up from little clay maquettes), but Emin’s washes of pinks, grays and blues, from which the outlines of bodies begin to emerge, evoke the delicate and tentative effort to express feelings. All her own.

Emin is also an artist rooted in place: in her beloved Margate but also in her Britishness. (By contrast Hirst, Gary Hume’s, and the Chapmans’ art could have been made anywhere.) In one of her early provocative videos, she runs down streets half-naked, trailing a Union Jack. The beach huts, drunkenness and classic vernacular phrases like “fuck off and die you slag” place her art in a working-class experience of Britain in the Nineties and ever since. She is part of a “kitchen sink” tradition of British culture, tracing back to the plays of John Osborne in the Fifties and forward to Mike Leigh, Irvine Welsh and the films of Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard. Unlike most contemporary art of the past 20 years, there’s nothing shiny and glitzy about Emin’s art. As she wrote on one of her quilts, she’s Tracey from Margate. Always was, still is.

Given its predominance in recent years, it’s easy to forget that the phenomenon is a relatively recent one. It was in November 2011 that John Lewis first sucker-punched the UK public with a Christmas ad so obscenely emotional that it would change the tone of festive ads for a generation. We saw a small boy impatient for Christmas morning: when the crack of dawn arrives, he leaps out of bed, runs past the stack of presents in his room and bursts in on his mum and dad with the gift he has bought for them all by himself. There was barely a dry eye left in the country.

It was grand and glossy — and almost shocking in its attempts to pull on the nation’s heartstrings. British ads had usually aimed to be funny; like the society they spoke to, they preferred to hide their feelings behind gags and irony rather than hang them all out for the neighbours to see. But just over a decade ago, as the nation was first acclimatising to the sour taste of austerity, it was as if we were all ready for something brazenly sweet. By 2012, every other brand was employing the same formula: tear-jerking tales of Yuletide loneliness, love and redemption, all set to whimsical, ghostly cover versions of classic pop ballads. 

This year’s offerings look more like the festive ads of the Eighties, which helped shape Generation X’s childhood perception of Christmas. Watching them now on YouTube reminds me of an altogether less serious time, in which The Goodies and Windsor Davies dressed up as Santa and hawked discount blank cassettes from Woolies; in which groups of lads got trollied on cans of Harp and chatted up Linda Lussadi at the Christmas party. And the slogans: so transactional, so knockabout, so pleasingly guileless: “For Christmas, Woolworths is right up your street!” “Can you imagine Christmas without a trip to Boots?” 

These were the days when British advertising was regarded as the best in the world: it was funny, earthy and colloquial. Its so-called “golden age” had been fostered by an eclectic generation of young creatives, many of whom would go onto bigger and better things: Ridley and Tony Scott, David Puttnam and the Saatchi brothers among them. From “Heineken Refreshes The Parts Other Beers Can’t Reach” to “Tell Them About The Honey Mummy”, the ads were extremely memorable and didn’t ever insult the audience by taking themselves too seriously. The prevailing attitude of the British adman was: if you’re going to push yourself into someone’s living room uninvited, you might as well do it with a bit of charm and good humour. To shamelessly pull at the heart strings was thought of as manipulative and altogether American. 

Suggested reading

How the Krampus stole Christmas

By Mary Harrington

There were some exceptions. The Eighties Yellow Pages campaign, featuring elderly fly fisherman J.R. Hartley seeking out his long-lost magnum opus, was a rare tearjerker that many ad people of the time found cringeworthy. But it was a success for the brand, and people have remembered it ever since. Written by British adman David Abbot, it was directed by the American Bob Brooks who said: “When I first came to the UK, I found that the ads were funny but there was a reluctance to become too emotional — the Yellow Pages ads showed there’s nothing wrong with sentiment. Why do you think there are so many dogs and babies in commercials? Because the consumer responds to it!” 

In the early years of the 21st century, this idea was fully embraced by the British ad industry, by now unrecognisable from its glory days: gone are the misfits and mavericks who had once dominated the creative departments. In the last couple of decades, advertising has been created via corporate processes overseen by middle-class marketing graduates. Ads have become formulaic, and humour is widely mistrusted as a selling device — not least because it is harder to translate across the international markets that big brands now traverse. Emotions are more universal, more adaptable, and less dependent on dialogue. It’s an approach that generally makes for boring and forgettable adverts — but which comes into its own around Christmas. People are more sentimental at this time of year, yes, but “sadvertising” doesn’t just pull on the heartstrings. It’s also designed to guilt-trip parents, playing into their intense desire to give their kids the perfect Christmas.

Does making us feel bad actually translate into commercial benefit for the advertiser? “If you’re anything other than the market leader, then these sorts of ads don’t help you,” says legendary adman Dave Trott. “They just remind people that it’s Christmas and they need to buy presents. And then they all go on Amazon to buy them.” His advice is this: “Supermarkets and stores need to say more than Christmas is great. They need to specify why you should do your Christmas shopping with them.”

This might have been the realisation that John Lewis came to before conceiving this year’s ad. It switched ad agencies for the first time in over a decade for the 2023 campaign, and dropped the “sadvertising” approach that it had once pioneered. Made by Saatchi & Saatchi, the new ad is a strange, entertaining little film whose main character is a giant, anthropomorphic Venus flytrap. With shades of ET, it feels like a significant gear change: less glum and more fun. “People are over having their heartstrings pulled by Christmas ads,” says Ben Mooge, Executive Creative Director of Publicis, the group who own Saatchis. “Joy, comedy and celebration is the new thing.” Maybe the British public, collectively traumatised by a succession of national crises, are just fed up of being made to feel bad. And perhaps brands have come to realise that it’s not their place to lecture the consumer.

Suggested reading

Why we cling on to Christmas

By Paul Kingsnorth

Plus, it’s actually helping sell stuff. John Lewis sources tell me sales of Venus flytraps have already increased by 600%. Whereas in the wake of last year’s John Lewis ad — centred on a middle-aged dad learning to skateboard in order to bond with his new foster son — consumers who turned up at John Lewis looking to purchase a skateboard themselves were disappointed to find that the stores didn’t actually stock them. 

But while the big brands might have ditched sadvertising this year, the strategy is still working for some. Charlie’s Bar — a small pub in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland — produced a sadvertisement for just £700 this year, which promptly went viral. It features an elderly man being shunned by passersby in the street before arriving at Charlie’s, ordering a pint of stout, and being approached by a dog, whose owners eventually join him for a chat. The ad was viewed over 1.5 million times on social media within its first week. This is what John Lewis knew all along: sadvertising works best when it taps into our deepest fears. And there’s nothing we fear more than being alone.