The Dialectics of Art by John Molyneux;

Author:John Molyneux;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2020-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Emin Phenomenon or the Phenomenal Emin

This is the complete version of an article that first appeared in edited form as ‘Emin Matters’ in International Socialism 106 (Spring 2005).

Tracey Emin is a new phenomenon and consequently, like many new phenomena in the past, is met with widespread incomprehension, misunderstanding and vilification. When I read much of the press coverage she receives, including from some ‘respectable’ critics, I am reminded of the reaction, documented so tellingly by T. J. Clark, to Manet’s Olympia when it first appeared in the Salon in 1865. Then the critics, faced with a painting that contested the prevailing conceptions of art, women, sex and class, were not even able to recognise or articulate the nature of the challenge offered, and therefore responded with misplaced sarcasm and invective. Something very similar occurs with Emin, who as it happens – and I do not think this is coincidence – deals with just the same issues today. At the same time, there is very little serious or academic discussion of Emin’s work, which is rather remarkable given the vast recent academic discourses on all things ‘artistic’ and ‘cultural’. This essay is an attempt to redress the balance and to argue, on the basis of her work, that Emin is a serious and important artist.

First, however, I want to discuss the nature of Emin’s fame, which is one of the things about her which is new. Tracy Emin is currently the most famous contemporary artist in Britain, and a woman. I don’t think this has ever happened before. Obviously there have been famous women artists in the past – Barbara Hepworth, Frida Kahlo and so on – but they have not been the leading artists of the day. Hepworth was overshadowed by Moore and Bacon, Kahlo by Rivera, not to mention Picasso. Again, this is not by chance. When the YBAs – Young British Artists – broke into the mainstream with the Sensation show in 1997, eighteen out of the forty-two artists exhibited were women – still a minority, but a far larger minority than would have been the case in an impressionist, surrealist, abstract expressionist or pop art show, or any previous art movement that I can think of. Moreover, of that minority, not only Emin but also Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Fiona Rae, Gillian Wearing and Sam Taylor-Wood have emerged as major figures in the art world. Clearly this reflects underlying changes in the social position of women. Equally clearly, however, there is an element of barely concealed misogynistic backlash in some of the responses to Emin.

Also new and different is the precise nature of Emin’s fame: she is a ‘celebrity’. In a sense many artists have been celebrities before – Michelangelo, Titian, Rubens and especially Picasso were all celebrities of a kind (far bigger celebrities than Emin), but in their case it meant being lionised, almost worshipped, in ‘cultural’ circles. Emin is a celebrity in today’s ‘celebrity culture’, which is a mass media popular culture; it means she appears on Have I Got News For You?, Desert Island Discs and Richard and Judy.

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