Mick Hartley

Not that one wants to go on about Tracey Emin and her new show at the Hayward, but somehow Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak's review [£] invites some sort of response.

There are two familiar gambits used by those who want to argue for the artistic merits of Emin et al., and both of them turn up here.

He starts off bemoaning the lack of recognition given by the major UK galleries to the Brit Art mob – Emin, Damien Hirst, the Chapmans, etc.. If only. Then, straight in to gambit no. 1:

Three hundred years ago, the British art establishment could not stomach Hogarth. Today, it cannot handle Tracey Emin.

I suppose we shoud be grateful it's not Picasso. It normally is: as in, "They used to hate Picasso when he first arrived, but now…". Except the point being made is about Britain and so it's Hogarth.

What can you say? Something on the lines of Bob Dylan's 115th Dream perhaps:

I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”
He said, “You’re not Him".

Tracey Emin ain't Hogarth.

Then, inevitably, gambit no. 2:

[T]his is not a show for the culturally demure or anyone who does not like pubic hair. Indeed, if you fall into that camp, stay away.

If you can't handle the harsh truths, the reality of a modern woman who's willing to put her sensuality out there, on the line….if you're such a sad sack that you'd prefer…oooh, a watercolour exhibition by Aylesbury Women's Institute, then inevitably Tracey's upfront and challenging talent is not for you.

He's got form here, Waldemar Januszczak. At the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2008, Tracey Emin was given a room of her own to curate. This, for him, was the only worthwhile part of the show. With the relish of a naughty schoolboy, he loves the idea of sticking it to those art-establishment stuffed-shirts by displaying lots of genitals:

Emin, meanwhile, is constitutionally incapable of middle-browness. She just can’t do it. So, the deliciously outrageous display she has inflicted on the summer show is chiefly about nudity and sex. There’s even a sign outside warning visitors that some of the exhibits “may cause offence”. The “may” is optimistic. Miss Marple will run a mile at the sight of Mat Collishaw’s wonky pseudo-Victorian automaton, featuring a life-sized zebra having sex with a woman in what the title assures us is “the old-fashioned way”. Or the gory collages of that crazy Austrian proto-Emin Elke Krystufek, who pictures a menstruating mother inserting her fingers into herself and showing us the blood. The Israeli artist Sigalit Landau gives us a powerful video of a naked woman doing a Hula Hoop routine with a ring of barbed wire on a seashore. There’s a big gold painting by Gary Hume of a fuzzily gendered figure in underpants. And a lovely work by Emin, full of gentle pink hesitations, which finally reveals itself to be a reclining nude opening her legs.

For Emin, this is a return to form…

Well, you get the idea.

But towards the end of his review of her new show, there are signs that even Waldemar's willingness to give Tracey a free pass in the name of her thrilling sexual explicitness is beginning to wear thin:

The entire top floor of the Hayward has been given over to a seemingly endless inspection of the Emin pudenda and the torturous consideration of her need to masturbate.

The autobiographical element of her art that had previously triggered such exciting angers and dark thirsts for vengeance is now channelled exclusively into a pale and creamy sexual narcissism. Preying for a Penis is the title of one drawing; Masturbating of another; Thinking About It of a third….

Perhaps the penny's beginning to drop that, far from being a neo-dadaist intent on subversion and shock, Tracey was always a one-trick pony going on and on about herself and her sex life, and – along with her fellow Brit Artist Damien Hirst with his dead shark and his diamond-encrusted skull which sold for £50m – this whole movement, introduced by ad-man Charles Saatchi, and manipulated by gallery-owner and art dealer Jay Jopling, may have fooled art critics who see themselves as championing rebels and cultural provocateurs, but was always more about making piles of money by flogging off second-rate tat as serious art.

Could it be that with this show Emin and the Brit Art generation have finally jumped the shark?