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Sunday 22 November 2009

The artist as exhibitionist

Well, it would be nice to think Tim Adams is right when he says that shares in Tracey Emin are hitting the floor:

She was magnificently self-obsessed (there was no such thing as society in the work of most of the Brit­artists, and certainly not in hers) and artfully melodramatic, and had an eye to the main chance... Like a latter-day Edie Sedgwick, the original Warhol Factory girl, she would use her ruined life as her art, only this time the subject would be in control of it....

Critics have been announcing the death of Britart for almost as long as they have been heralding the demise of the English novel, but with the onset of a severe economic winter, it is a fair bet that the vicarious pleasures of childhood deprivation and adult squalor will lose some of their addictive charm. Repetitive angst and calculated stories of abuse are likely to prove less seductive to an audience that has anxieties of its own. It is hard to believe that Emin herself, at least in her public expressions, will ever grow up (the brand would not allow it), but it is possible that her audience and her buyers will have to.

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