She is known as the bad girl of modern art. Tracey Emin is famous for exhibiting her unmade bed (My Bed, 1998) as a nominee for the 1999 Turner Prize.
Her work has been described as crude, primitive, uninteresting, ill-informed and objectionable. She herself has been described as narcissistic, vulgar, a bully and a con-artist. It was therefore with some trepidation that my wife and I entered the Modern Art Oxford (formerly The Museum of Modern Art) to view her latest exhibition, This is Another Place.
Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in Margate. Her Turkish Cypriot father admits to having fathered 23 children and during Tracey's childhood he was maintaining two families. He was therefore, understandably, only intermittently present. Tracey's mother set virtually no limits for her. At the age of 13 she was raped. In her mid-teens she had a period of extreme promiscuity, while in her 20s she had a couple of bad affairs and had two abortions. The first, performed in 1990, 'went wrong' and the second, in 1992 was done 'without heart'. In 1992 she committed emotional suicide. She explains that:
