Emin is an artist who is doing what Courtney Love used to be doing, which is being an empoweredly revolting, fucked-up slag. This isn't entirely a bad thing: Women need more negative role models. Too many girls are hung up on being perfect and pliable and thin and desirable; we need more rude, polluted, unsocialized harpies around to maintain some kind of civilized balance between "real" women and the ones my mother always referred to as "Uncle Toms" (i.e. models, or those demure zombies who aspire to look like models in order to hunt rich gentlemen in the Hamptons). I find Tracey Emin kind of nervy yet dull in the same way that all neurotic, autobiographical, tabloid shite is nervy yet dull, but pro-Tracey critics seem to think that her reckless, alcoholic exhibitionism is some kind of breakthrough in human vulnerability.

She is a painful sex object, indulging a taste for what Courtney Love once dubbed "angry vagina" art: "My cunt is wet with fear" reads one of Emin's neon signs, posted over a filthy bed. I can think of a lot of unfamous people who've beaten the grotesque personal-disclosure horse for years (myself, even!), who are lots more interesting and tortured and outlandish than Emin and who merit no more than avoidance in public circumstances, but then again, those people weren't as photogenic as anorexic hottie-scamp Emin. They never got a big, leggy, pouty photo of themselves in a black slip and heels in the New Yorker.

Besides a bunch of skill-free watercolors, Emin's super-confessional one-woman exhibit consists of strange, niggardly little quilts on which she's sewn cryptic and outrageously misspelled statements, and video of herself and more video of herself talking about herself, claiming and demanding respect and attention for the fact that she used to fuck a lot of people, she was raped, she was treated poorly by men she fucked, she was anorexic and so on. Oh, and lotsa bloody tampons lying around. For Christ's sake. Why old tampons? Why the browned and clotted old plugs? We really need to see this? The cheapest chick-trick in the old art book? Why not a white-on-white canvas or a spray-painted mannequin, if we're going for all the dumbest art clichés? Emin's contributions to the world of visual culture are very thin gruel. Anorexic gruel, even.

One of the most annoying things in the Emin exhibit is the framed pages from a London Times interview of herself, all dolled up in a little designer dress and big makeup, coyly smoking and acting the sexy enfant terrible, next to which she has framed a scrawled, semi-illiterate notebook entry about how shitty she felt the day of the photo shoot, how she hadn't eaten in days, how she trudged home in the rain, etc. Emin is trying to get over with Jackson Pollock behavior, but with no actual daring painting innovation; Jeanette Winterson's drunken, sexual dysfunction without any lyrical writing style. Emin's art is really just the viewer's totally indulged, prurient interest in her personal life, which is worn on her pretty face and black sleeve, and jets poisonously out of her mouth like the tequila heaves.

The only beauty Emin brings to the table, besides the ugly truth about the squalid way she chooses to live, is whatever there is on her own body that she hasn't yet destroyed. I don't find Emin's pitiful, psychology-of-the-oppressed-female stance heroic; I think it's shallow in the same way Mariko Mori is shallow. She's just the dirty side of the same Mori-model coin. Real self-destroying nihilistic cult art victim/heroes all hit their glories and died in the '80s, for good, stupid reasons. Emin is too little too late. Besides, an exhibition for an exhibitionist is redundant.

Art-star Tracey's being raped a different way here in America: Doesn't she realize that American galleries only say they love her because they want to get into her popularity pants? They don't want to know her as an "artist," they want her to be famous here like she is in the U.K., a model for Bombay Gin ads. I can see it now, Absolut Emin: an empty bottle with a brownish tampon inside next to a dirty bed. Soon to be a billboard over a Banana Republic near you. Swanky.
salon.com | June 2, 1999

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