The Tortured Artist As Marketing Device

Controversial British artist Tracey Emin has made a career out of being alternately outrageous and outraged, creating works that demand attention but decrying the bad press she gets. It might be a recipe for modern pop culture success, but it doesn’t seem to make for a very stable head space. “[Emin] is, it hardly needs saying, a survivor, and her often harrowing struggle with the world, and with herself, is the narrative that threads through all her work. It’s all there – the teenage rapes, the abortions, the cruel and tender boyfriends, the depressions and suicide attempts, the memory of them stitched into her angry, appliquŽd quilts, dragged up though her scratchy, sad drawings, writ large in her scrawled, dysfunctional sentences that look like they have been scratched into the paper as if her life depended upon it.”