Tracey Emin

Feminine Art Sold in a Masculine Way

Women are significantly over represented in the ranks of art students, in professions involved in the promotion of arts and in public art bureaucracies that make decisions on the distribution of art funding. Despite this over representation, it is men whose works dominate the collections of art galleries, and which attain the highest sales in the auction market. The unequal representation at the business end of the art has elicited some criticism.  In 1989,  the feminist art group Guerrilla Girls criticised New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art because less than 5 percent of the Met’s modern-art holdings were by women. The protests had little impact. By 2005, that figure had dropped to 3 per cent.

The career of Tracey Emin shows that it is possible for women to make a career out of art, but to do so, they need to adopt a masculine approach to art promotion that many women are perhaps uncomfortable with. Specifically, the business end of the art market is somewhat of a battleground in which art is put on display in the hope it will elicit ridicule in a way that will heighten recognition. For example, Murakami, Manzoni, Hirst, Warhol, Duchamp, Cezanne, and Van Gogh, all had rejection and/or media indignation as significant parts of their artistic persona, which in turn appeals to art buyers and museum curators. Tracey Emin has followed in the same footsteps by creating art that is ridiculed. Because her art is an expression of her life, she is ridiculed along with it.  In short,

Emin announced herself in 1997 with her artwork Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995. The artwork consisted of a tent with the names of everyone she had slept with sewn into it. These names included former sexual partners, relatives she slept with as a child, and her two children that would have been born had she not  aborted them. Although it was a concept piece about intimacy, the title deliberately invited interpretations that it was an exhibition of her sexual conquests. Naturally, such an interpretation invited ridicule that was conducive to market awareness.

Later that year, Emin invited more ridicule when she appeared drunk on a live TV discussion about England’s Turner Prize. She proceeded to swear profusely, insult other panel members, insult the show and declare she wanted to leave to be with her mum.

 More media outrage came in 1999 when she exhibited her work My Bed in the Turner Prize. The bed was presented as it had been after a relationship breakup. It included yellow stains on sheets, condoms, empty alcohol bottles, and underwear stained with menstrual blood. Again, the media outrage helped build Emin’s fame and fortune.

My Bed (1999)

Still more fame came when an ex-boyfriend, Billy Childish, used a criticism she had directed at him to form the Stuckism art moment. Specifically, Emin said to Childish,  "Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! – Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!"  Childish created a movement that mocked conceptual art. When they were protesting against the Turner Prize, Stuckist used a cut out of Emin to mock her. The Stuckists were riding off Emin’s coat tails, but in so doing, they were also helping Emin’s fame grow.

In 2006, Emin was chosen to represent Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Adrea Rose, Head of Visual Arts at the British Council, said Emin was chosen because she could help promote British interests in foreign markets. In her own words,

"our job is to use art to serve Britain's foreign policy objectives overseas. At the moment our priorities are China, Russia, the Islamic world, Africa."

Emin duly showed paintings of her legs and vagina with titles such as Asleep Alone With Legs Open and Masturbating. As Emin would have expected, criticism was again forthcoming.

Mastubating (2006)

Emin is an inspiration for women artists in the sense that she has become very wealthy and is highly respected in some art circles. However, it is unlikely that many female artists would like to go through what she has had to go through to become famous. They don’t want to step into galleries feeling as if the knives are being sharpened, nor do they want to encourage the sharpening of knives to attain the promotional benefits. As a result, many women never have solo exhibitions or never exhibit at all. If they do exhibit, it is more likely to be in groups or in all-female exhibitions specifically targeted at female audiences where they feel safer.

The gravitation towards female-only art exhibitions, and promotion in books that are marketed as female only, poses additional problems because they exclude men from their audience. Additionally, artists who only want to work with other females are prone to produce art which does not tolerate a male perspective and is therefore inaccessible to men. This is a problem when the female artist seeks to sell her work at art auctions. In Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton noted that the majority of buyers at art aunctions were men, which Thornton believed had something to do with male artists being more famous than female artists. Although Thornton didn’t elaborate, it is likely that if male buyers are not aware of the female artist, or the subject matters that the female deals with are inaccessible to males, then they will not buy it. Because media publicity follows high-end sales, and museums in turn follow publicity, female artists don’t get the mainstream publicity. In short, promoting to a female-only audience is indeed safer, but it is not conducive to gaining awareness in a world where both genders are present and discuss issues.

Admittedly, most male artists don’t want to experience indignation to find success either, but the promotional model has largely been created by male artists over the last century and is therefore more of a reflection of male sensibilities. Furthermore, men rarely organise men-only art exhibitions or design art books which are sold under the banner of being male art. Even though they often end up in male-only promotions, it is not by conscious design and the gender of the artists is not part of the promotion.  As a result, the art is more likely to be known by both men and women. This helps facilitate second-hand word of mouth promotion in conversations where both men and women are present. In turn, this helps the male art gain recognition amongst the buyers of art.

Tracey Emin’s work is feminine in many ways, but her manner of going about promotion is masculine. She exhibits with men, and makes work that is accessible to both genders. Most importantly, she deliberately invites indignation from both genders in the knowledge that it will help her market awareness. She has taken to the artworld as if it is a battleground, and has emerged victorious.