Mick Hartley

As Tracey Emin's retrospective opens at the Hayward, Mark Lawson at CiF wonders if perhaps, since women artists are subject to different rules from men, they should be differently critiqued. It's a question we've all asked ourselves at some time.

The serious tone of Lawson's piece, where he takes it for granted that Emin is "the dominant woman artist of her generation", and someone who has "systematically challenged the continuing male bias of the cultural world", is in stark contrast to the loud raspberry delivered almost unanimously in the comments, summed up by one of the first, which sets the tone for what follows:

Emin isn't an artist. She's just Kerry Katona let loose with some crayons.

The disjunction between the critics' view and that of the public, always more noticeable with modern art than other areas of culture, reaches new levels with Tracey. "Emperor's new clothes!" everyone shouts, while the critical justification for her inane doodles and self-obsession gets increasingly convoluted [£] – always with the implication that if you don't appreciate her unique talent it can only be because you're a cultural conservative and, more likely, a woman-hater.  

And here, bang on cue, comes Brian Sewell: cultural conservative most definitely, and he's certainly been accused of misogyny in the past. Not someone, frankly, that I've ever been able to take entirely seriously before now given his almost caricatured opinions and absurdly mannered accent. But…cometh the hour, cometh the man. At last his disdain for much of the modern art world has found a worthy target:

How has it been possible for Miss Emin, once notoriously drunk and abusive, formerly "Mad Tracey from Margit", now moaning with self-pity , to have become, as the Hayward's panjandrum put it, one of this country's "most renowned and celebrated artists"? How have our definitions of art and, even more preposterously, sculpture, been so elastic as to include crudely patchworked blankets, crude images of body functions, crude neon admonitions and crude lifesize dilapidations of the beach hut? Far from being "really good with words", she is illiterate, witless, turns the alphabet topsy-turvy and employs the language of graffiti boys. Miss Emin's words and images, laden with catharsis, are less art than bullying demands for empathy.

Skill, if she ever had any, has been usurped by celebrity; celebrity has been nourished by deliberate outrage and offence; and now, in the constant public parading of private distress, she has developed a hectoring arrogance that conflicts with what is left of the instinctive self-abjection that has always been her home-made muse.

One of the better put-downs that I've read….worth reading in full.