Tracey Emin: art into life
- Submitting institution
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Middlesex University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 1605
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.5040/9781350160637
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury
- ISBN
- 9781350160606
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This book represents the culmination of a long-standing engagement with Emin’s oeuvre and celebrity and fills a gap in the literature on the artist. Despite an extremely successful career that includes representing Britain at the Venice Biennial, most of the literature devoted to this Royal Academician tends to be expositional or promotional and is often commissioned or supported by White Cube or the artist herself, with only a handful of notable exceptions. After extensive research, my co-editor (Deborah Cherry) and I carefully selected our contributors, who were invited to explore aspects of the artist’s work that have received little or no attention. The book includes the definitive art historical account to date of the multiple iterations of Emin’s most notorious work, ‘My Bed’; a critique of her collaboration with fabricators and makers by renowned craft expert Glenn Adamson; a discussion of Emin’s expressionist printmaking as an undergraduate student by her tutor John White; and an essential contextualisation of Emin’s ethnicity in terms of Cypriot diasporic identity by fellow Turkish-Cypriot artist and scholar Alev Adil. My own chapter returned to a previously published article (Wasafiri, 2010) where I argued that the artist’s name had been elevated into a polysemous signifier and examined the current meanings of ‘Tracey Emin’ as sign in the context of the culture wars. Taking a minor exhibition as a starting point, Peter Goodfellow’s ‘Treason of the Scholars’ (Panter and Hall, 2015), I traced ‘Emin’’s travails in art and popular culture at the time of her transition from ‘bad girl’ to establishment. Having become an emblem of the ‘yBas’ despite her marginal place in their group, Emin continues to attract a steady stream of inattentive approbation that conveys nothing of her artistic significance but speaks volumes on the re-emergence of reactionary, misogynist and racist cultural forces.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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