Up close and personal Emin show draws mixed reviews
EDINBURGH (AFP) - The first retrospective of work by Tracey Emin, the enfant terrible artist who has made a career out of intimate personal details including her own unmade bed, has opened to mixed reviews.
As well as “My Bed”, a mess of vodka bottles, cigarette butts and dirty underwear, “Tracey Emin: 20 Years” also features “Conversations With My Mum”, a video of her talking to her mother, and “It’s Not The Way I Want To Die”, a model of the rollercoaster in her home town of Margate.
The show, at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, has attracted more than 13,000 visitors in the three weeks since it opened, but many critics have been scathing, accusing her of being unsubtle and self-important.
Most of the works focus on the artist’s own life — her teenage years, being raped at the age of 13, relationships and fears about never being a mother — with an unblinking intensity.
“Emin has turned her life into a public spectacle like no other artist before her,” wrote Patrick Elliott, the exhibition’s curator, in its catalogue.
Born in 1963, Emin is, alongside figures such as Damien Hirst, associated with the Young British Artists group which emerged in London in the 1990s.
Her eye-opening works have made her a household name and brought financial success — millionaire advertising guru Charles Saatchi, a major collector of contemporary British art, has repeatedly snapped up her pieces.
Emin has gradually become part of the art establishment — she became a member of the Royal Academy in 2007 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale last year.
But she still draws stinging reviews from some critics.
“By the end of this show, I felt as if someone had been shouting at me down the phone for a couple of hours — a kind of emotional earache,” The Guardian newspaper’s reviewer wrote.
The Times was hardly more flattering — “What distresses me far more than Emin’s taste for the obscene… is her amazing, unshakable faith in her own importance,” its reviewer said.
Visitors to the Edinburgh show were divided in their reactions, meanwhile.
“Heavy, boring, rubbish” and “personal, thought-provoking, absorbing” were just two of the comments left in a visitors book.
The show runs in Edinburgh until November 9 and travels to the Contemporary Art Centre in Malaga, Spain from November 28 to February 22, 2009, and the Art Museum in Bern, Switzerland from March 10 to June 21, 2009.
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