Tracey Emin: failure + charisma = success Ascendancy Historically, Tracey Emin’s rise was a touch-and-go situation: you could laugh in embarrassment or ignore her or maybe embrace the madness—and the last one won. Between 1993, her first show at White Cube, and 1999, her Turner Prize nomination, she took the artworld. After that, she took the world and became Cleopatra, with Elton John as Caesar and Prada as the Roman army.

Bowing and scraping Art writers round the world who want to be thought of as informed tend to be admiring toward her. She is thought to have suffered in life and to have found ways to transform suffering into art. In England, knowledge of her greatness reaches far beyond the artworld: art writers in the UK national press at first combined sneering with sympathy and then gradually caved in. Now it’s all-out fawning. She’s a household name. Years ago, she could be mocked as a media tart and a hopeless exhibitionist (in the pathological sense), but now it’s considered a great faux pas to come out with an opinion like this.

Very good I like her sewn blankets on a visual level. Typically, they have headline information about her childhood or else announce important, sometimes misspelled thoughts she’s just had, such as I AM DISGUSTED BY YOUR ENVEY OR HOW COULD I EVER LEAVE YOU? Their verbal-diarrhea element, the sewn-on words not having anything deep to communicate but just being a kind of gushing, shouldn’t be troubling. There seems to have to be something unreflective about the slogan-making process in order to get the energy going to be able to come up with such good color and shape decisions.

Nude Emin’s paintings—which are a relatively recent stylistic turn for her—consist of preciously handled, separated-out scrawls articulating a weak figuration: typically a sign for her nude body (for example, Asleep alone with legs open, 2005). In artworld circles, the conventional thing to say about them is that they are maybe a bit weak. Her failures always have the effect of successes. The audience beyond the artworld has no interest in degrees of weakness but just swallows the Emin act as a whole, which is more or less what the insider group does (with the exception of the October crowd, which is appalled by any betrayal of revolutionary ideals in favor of consumer ones).

Emote Someone shrieking on the reality-TV show Big Brother is the same as Emin shrieking outside Munch’s house; there’s no difference at all in depth of feeling. (She made a film in 1999 of herself nude screaming on a wooden jetty outside Munch’s summerhouse, called Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children.) Someone getting depressed on Big Brother is the same as Emin being depressed. But unlike them, she produces a lot of slogans about it—“You forgot to kiss my soul”; “My cunt is wet with fear”; “Every part of me’s bleeding”; “Exorcism of the last painting I ever made”— and sometimes makes them into needlework. The depression still isn’t interesting but the pleasure of the art object is. When these slogans or sound bites are made into neon signs like Nauman’s, or videos like Acconci’s, or driftwood sculptures like arte povera or little gouaches or oil paintings by any artworld me-too striver, it’s possible to feel impressed by the confidence but at the same time completely unengaged emotionally.

Pain My Bed is a famous work, exhibited in New York, London, and Tokyo: her unmade bed transposed from the private space of the bedroom to the public space of the gallery, but otherwise untransformed. What is it? A manufactured saintly relic: the great power it memorializes or stands for is Saint Pain, Saint Class, Saint Gender, Saint Femininity, Saint Abjection, Saint Ethnicity (English mother, Turkish father), and, of course, Saint Victim. Her devil muses are Drunk, Raped, and Can’t Spell. The popular audience receives all this simply as amazing glamour—simplicity is pretty powerful. For this audience (as expressed in a sublime moment in Spinal Tap when the band’s manager tries to sum up ideology), the operating notion when it comes to loving Emin is that we live in a sexy world or maybe a sexist one, and art like hers exists on some kind of edgy interface between the two.