Tracey Emin: Male artists ‘lose it’ in middle age

The bad girl of British art has said that the bad boy and his male peers lost it when they entered middle age.

Dame Tracey Emin, 61, said her fellow Young British Artist trailblazer Damien Hirst, 59, was no longer a “force” in the art world and that male artists “peak in their forties”.

Emin and Hirst were the leading rabble-rousers of the YBA movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which arguably became the leading artistic influence of the late 20th century.

She says Hirst has now lost his creative juices, having originally been filled with belief and conviction.

Emin, whose most famous work arguably remains her 1998 My Bed, complete with bodily secretions, underwear and slippers, said she believed there was a pattern in the art world.

While men “sort of peak in their forties … women just tend to come and come and come and come and come, so as a woman, you carry on coming all your life until you’re old”.

She cited artists such as the French-born Louise Bourgeois, who was still working and highly regarded by curators up until her death in 2010 aged 98, and the American Joan Mitchell, who Emin said was far greater than the much better known Jackson Pollock.

The 95-year-old female Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has continued to make work this century, including new versions of her renowned Infinity Mirror Rooms.

Emin said that in contrast, male artists lose their zip when they leave their youth, citing Hirst as an example.

“I think people who don’t make art, or don’t attempt to be an artist, don’t understand how difficult it is to have that conviction, that self-belief and everything,” she told the Louis Theroux podcast.

“Damien was a young artist that started off with a lot of that belief and a lot of that conviction. He was like a force. And now he’s not.”

• ‘Female art was a bargain — I created a gallery for the price of one male artist’

Hirst has been one of the most divisive — and lauded — artists of the past 40 years.

While he won the Turner Prize in 1995 with his cow and calf preserved in formaldehyde, called Mother and Child Divided, later projects have failed to enrapture critics.

His vast 2017 project at the Venice Biennale, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, comprised of almost 200 works, was described by one critic as “the most expensive artistic flop in living memory”.

In 1999 Emin was beaten to the Turner Prize by Steve McQueen, although her creations, including My Bed and Everyone I Have Ever Slept With — which recorded the names of the 102 people she had ever shared a bed with, including lovers — remain among the most iconic works of British contemporary art.

There are, of course, numerous examples of male artists whose late career works have been acclaimed, although perhaps not as much as earlier creations, including Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud and Sir Antony Gormley.

She refused to be drawn into answering questions from Theroux about Banksy, about whom little is definitively known, including his age. She said she did not want to be dragged “down a hole that I don’t want to go”.

Emin, who in 2020 was diagnosed with bladder cancer and undertook surgery which resulted in many of her reproductive organs being removed and a stoma bag being fitted, has continued to create art.

In 2019 she exhibited dozens of photographs taken during bouts of menopause-induced insomnia, while two years ago she created a solo exhibition, including a selection of self-portraits described by a Guardian critic as her “best figurative works yet”.

Emin, who received a damehood in the King’s birthday honours list for her services to art earlier this year, told the podcast that when she attended Buckingham Palace she had taken her stoma sack in a Victoria Beckham-designed bag.

The artist said she liked the “pomp and ceremony of the royal family” but described their lives as a “kind of living hell”.

She added of her preparations for the palace: “The reason why I had to have my night bag plugged in and my shopping bag when we met the King is because these things take time and you don’t know how long it’s going to take for them to come down the stairs and the last thing I want to do is be standing there ready to meet the King and Queen and then have to beforehand rush to the loo or my bag burst.

“That would be really embarrassing.”

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