Is that how it all adds up? And yet, this is so plainly and passionately and blatantly an impressive and moving work of art. Emin has the gift of being natural in the spotlight. She's her own real thing. My Bed too is utterly real. It is as simple as a photograph and as expressive as Van Gogh's chair … Or his bed.
The sheets may be stained but they have a weird purity. Artists have used many means to create self-portraits. Emin has used her bed and its surroundings. A lovely, simple idea. She agrees it is a self-portrait. It's like a ghost: there's this presence of someone but they're just not there any more. The cameras flash. The photographers shout her name. The woman who made the bed is here, and not here. We're none of us the same people we were. Perhaps, like a classic pop song, My Bed was always destined to get better with the years.
It really is a ghost. An old photograph, which is yellowing with time - the newspaper on the floor looks ancient. Cigarette stubs and tears. It's turning into a golden oldie. This article is more than 7 years old. The artist's most famous work compares with past masterpieces that create a self-portrait in objects. Tracey Emin sits beside her famous work: 'I really care about the bed. I was suffering with a broken heart at the time. As she points out, "I went to art school for seven years.
So how much is a broken heart worth? Reuse this content. How many artists pay 40 per cent tax? But you are penalised for your creativity, when you are actually giving something back. As an artist the majority of what you earn you put back into what you do.
New Labour? Have you been to an NHS hospital lately? I should have voted Green. The whole of politics in Britain needs to be really really shook up.
One of those who said so recently was Philip Hensher. Emin, he wrote in The Independent, was a half-witted dullard with no inquiring intelligence. The piece set in train one of the strangest art world spats of the year, with Hensher suggesting in a subsequent piece in The Spectator that Emin was conducting a vendetta against him. He pointed the finger at her after his home was inundated with unwanted deliveries including incontinence pads and Peter Rabbits figurines, and implied there was a homophobic edge to it all, in that the items were addressed to Miss Phyllis Henshaw.
Emin, denying she was behind the deliveries, responded by threatening to sue him. She won: The Spectator recently published a grovelling apology to her. I have a lot of gay friends so it was very hurtful.
But I was very happy with the apology and having my legal costs paid. When a lovely melody, a sublime landscape or a passage of exquisite poetry comes before your senses and your mind, you know that you are at home in the world. Beauty is the voice that settles us, the assurance that we belong among others, in a place of sharing and consolation. By contrast, the ugly art and architecture of today divides society rather than bringing it together. Written across so much of it is the word 'me'.
Beauty is not popular among professional architects - it suggests a scaling down of 'artistic' pretentions for the sake of people whom they don't need to know. The images of brutality and destruction in modern art, the tales of vicious and repugnant ways of life in today's novels, the violent and harrowing music of our age - all these are forms of egotism, ways in which insignificant people draw attention to themselves by standing ostentatiously apart from the majority of us who crave beauty.
Over the decades, this has produced both weariness and brutalisation in society, yet the critics still go along with it. And to gain favour from the critics today, you must avoid making something beautiful. This flies in history's face. The most sublime representations of the human form we owe to the pagan gods of antiquity.
We are in awe of those statues of Apollo and Venus which adorned ancient temples. Madonna of the Pinks by Raphael is one the religious images which has formed our tradition of painting. Our tradition of painting is owed to the Church and the icons that have illuminated Christian worship. You don't have to be a religious believer to appreciate the ecstasy of a Madonna by Bellini or Raphael, or the tranquillity of a temple Buddha.
Through so much human existence, art has sanctified the world, even in the eyes of those without religious faith. And when the scientific revolution of the 17th century cast doubt on the old Christian idea of a God-centred universe, artists sought to renew their faith through the beauty that surrounded them in the landscapes of nature.
Yet as society has become more urban and less religious, the cult of ugliness has taken hold. It can be no coincidence that it has come at a time of unprecedented prosperity.
Ugly modern art is produced by the pampered children of the democratic state, who have never had to struggle, who have not known war and who have entered at the earliest age into the lap of luxury.
Maybe we can live with their rubbish - after all, we don't have to frequent the museums and galleries where it is displayed. But modern architecture is unavoidable. Nowhere do we feel the need for beauty more vividly than in these vast, supposedly functional, buildings. Without ornament, grandeur, style or dignity, a building is opaque to us. We cannot find our way around it. Nothing seems to face us, to beckon to us, to welcome us.
When we enter such a building, we are immediately lost.
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