Product Description

The career of Tracey Emin, one of the best known contemporary British artists, has become a potent symbol of the relationship between art and celebrity in our time. When it was exhibited in London at the Tate in 1999, her now notorious installation My Bed was denounced by conservative critics as a national scandal, but this and her other work have continued to attract ever larger audiences. Whether storming drunkenly out of live television debates, talking tearfully about her abortions or modelling evening gowns for Vivienne Westwood, Tracey Emin makes headlines. Yet if Emin is now universally recognized as a media phenomenon, her work has also begun to attract serious critical attention. In The Art of Tracey Emin, distinguished critics from Britain and the United States explore her various artistic influences, for example Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, and the separate parts of her oeuvre - her installations (most notably My Bed and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With), her film and video works, and her monoprints. The final essay takes the form of an interview with the artist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28168 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

About the Author
Mandy Merck is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her latest book is In Your Face: Nine Sexual Studies. Chris Townsend is a lecturer in the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications include Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking.

Customer Reviews

Refreshingly open-minded responses to Tracey Emin's art
This collection contains 10 essays on Tracey Emin's art, which are complemented by over 50 black-and-white illustrations of her drawings, blankets, installations and video-work. It culminates in a fifteen-page interview with Emin herself.

Given that Emin's art often seems to provoke snobbish elitism and prejudices in many contemporary art critics - "it's childishly solipsistic", "too hermetically self-absorbed to be a great artist," etc. - it is absolutely refreshing that the critics in this collection approach her work seriously and without pedantry. The collection transcends those tedious "but it is art?" discussions that Guardian critics love to table and elevates debate on the tensions between autobiography and constructionism in her art to a new level. They place Emin's work in an art-historical context, revealing how artists such as Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, Gerhard Richter and Hannah Wilke have all influenced and informed her work up to now.

The most fascinating essay, I think, is Peter Osborne's analysis of Emin's photographic print "I've got it all, 2000", where Emin is sitting on the floor in a low-cut dress, looking down at the hoard of coins and notes she's holding onto between her bare, parted legs. The print is ambiguous, its title self-consciously ironic - is she stuffing her vagina with money (money as dildo, money as orgasm)? Or is the money penetrating her (money f*$!s with you, money f*$!s you over)? Or is it exuding from her like faeces or a child?

A few critics in the collection might take Emin's work a little too seriously; the best integrate its playful, ironic or humorous elements (Emin talks in the interview, for instance, of a film which she always wanted to make: "I wanted to be walking along a beach and then do a poo and bury it"). Emin seems to like paradoxes and tensions that trouble - "Love Poem, 1996", for example, is an appliqué blanket on which Emin has stitched a poem of hers equating sex with violence ("You put your hand / across my mouth still / the noise continues").

Emin strikes me as a very misunderstood artist, not as wildly controversial as her cultish supporters, and not as uninformed by artistic traditions as her detractors, would have us believe. This collection constitutes a considerable step towards demystifying her art.

Warmly recommended!

Someone talking about Emin-other than Emin herself!
A must for anyone interested in the relationship between celebrity and art. It provides great analysis of Emins work and of her background. It also features some work that I'd never seen before. Well written and laid out with extra info on subjects related to Emins work, which sometimes deviated from the work. Buy it if your interested in emin.

Lacks Billy Childish
Whilst this book has some interesting information and insights into Tracey Emins working practice, quite how the authors can omit Emin's relationship with the artist Billy Childish in the early 80's is frankly beyond me. Tracey has said in the past that Childish "was a major influence on my life." And Tracey worked selling books on Childish's small press Hangman Books for several years. The book is worth owning but it does make one question the level of research that has actually gone into other areas of the book and the final edit.