{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreidsgfu3vh56dwrf4pohivpm6lbzfcwkhabxtuxqfqjjjih3i7ggfy",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:pnvmwoko6ujujdbnnb4gnw2c/app.bsky.feed.post/3mgslx4zj3pg2"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreia4snnkag752obkjnquapvjn2qdcveqcgep7qpwckeojtkrecxs5u"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/jpeg",
    "size": 45190
  },
  "path": "/2026/03/tracey-emins-political-responsibility/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-11T09:22:19.000Z",
  "site": "https://tribunemag.co.uk",
  "tags": [
    "Emin maintained",
    "voting for him",
    "London-based children",
    "‘Bring your own booze!’",
    "designed to evoke",
    "who needed no",
    "she told BBC Radio 4",
    "she condemned",
    "publicly supporting him",
    "_I followed you to the end,_",
    "asked",
    "Starmer’s Labour",
    "called",
    "cramped housing",
    "the party’s candidates’",
    "Bill",
    "Emin clarified",
    "30 percent",
    "when she threatened",
    "calls for the rich",
    "Sally Rooney’s support",
    "filmmakers",
    "BRIT Awards",
    "points out",
    "feminist"
  ],
  "textContent": "### After years of publicly supporting Conservative governments, Tracey Emin now presents herself as non-partisan — yet the personal agonies depicted in her work remain inseparable from the political contexts that shaped them.\n\n* * *\n\nTracey Emin, _My Bed_ , 1998. (Credit: Prudence C via The Saatchi Gallery.)\n\nIn 2022, Dame Tracey Emin — the art world’s former darling _enfant terrible_ — requested that the government remove one of her artworks from 10 Downing Street. The piece in question, _More Passion_ (2010), was a neon sign previously gifted to the government’s art collection when David Cameron was in office in 2011. It was only the year before that Cameron’s Tory-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats had wasted no time in raising university tuition fees and ushering in their decade of austerity, but Emin maintained that the ‘Tories [were] only hope for the arts.’\n\nShe went on to profess her support for Boris Johnson: first, voting for him as Mayor and then the two worked together on a campaign to encourage London-based children to ‘unleash their creative talents’. But when the full extent of the Partygate scandal was revealed (including, but not limited to, a forty person ‘Bring your own booze!’ session during the height of 2020’s lockdown restrictions), Emin decided that _More Passion_ — designed to evoke the atmosphere of ‘funfairs, casinos, red-light districts, and bars’ — was no longer office-appropriate for Johnson’s Tories, who needed no ‘encouragement on this level.’ The request wasn’t ‘political,’ she told BBC Radio 4, but ‘a moral, ethical thing.’\n\nIn what world could we consider a protest against Partygate apolitical? Not this one, I’m sure. The very party responsible for enforcing punitive lockdown restrictions was also brazenly flouting them, marking a death knell for Johnson’s premiership and very likely the Tories’ ousting in 2024. Emin’s political disillusionment began sometime before the Partygate revelations: in 2019, she condemned Tony Blair’s involvement in the Iraq War (after publicly supporting him, too) and Cameron’s Brexit crusade, stating that the two would ‘be remembered in history for doing the most terrible things to our political system.’ However, there’s been no real political fervour from Emin since, and certainly not in support of any party.\n\nWhen her last major UK exhibition, _I followed you to the end,_ opened in 2024, the _Guardian_ ’s Simon Hattenstone asked ‘how her Conservatism expresses itself in her art’. Emin defensively replied that she voted for the Animal Welfare Party in 2019 and planned to vote for Labour in the 2024 election, to which Hattenstone then describes her as sounding like an ‘on-message Labour MP’ after slating Johnson and Rishi Sunak’s handling of the pandemic. I don’t think that criticising one party means that you should be automatically affiliated with the opposition — particularly when that’s Starmer’s Labour — but I also think Emin’s political hedging, given her previous alignment, has made it harder to know what she _actually_ wants us to do with her art.\n\nIn the press run before _A Second Life_ , her major Tate Modern retrospective, which opened last week, she rightly called on us to challenge Reform’s ‘borderline neo-Nazi rhetoric’. But her proposed solution of tactical voting (‘vote Tory, vote anything, vote Green, but don’t let Reform get in’) offers us no meaningful recourse against fascism either.\n\nTo be clear, _A Second Life_ is a phenomenal exhibition and is fully deserving of all its plaudits. Boasting some of her most famous works — like _My Bed_ (2009) — and a selection of newer paintings, the show charts Emin’s turbulent life, including the slurs hurled at her mother for marrying a Turkish Cypriot man, her experiences of child rape, a near-fatal abortion, and her bladder cancer diagnosis. One thin room is filled with polaroids documenting Emin’s body during the cancer, her bleeding stoma extending out of her stomach. Other rooms are devoted to films such as _Why I Never Became a Dancer_ (1995), in which she talks about leaving school at thirteen and having demeaning, abusive sex with much older men. Walking around the Tate Modern, I was struck by how many of the personal agonies she depicts here are inseparable from the political contexts that might have engendered them.\n\nEqual only to Emin’s radical depictions of femininity are her uncompromising portraits of working-class life. Born in 1963 in a pre-gentrified Margate, Kent, she grew up in a seaside town hollowed out by declining tourism. By the 1980s and 1990s, as Margate became a hotspot for the ‘ _Trainspotting_ generation’, its social life had become increasingly stratified; opportunities for cultural or educational advancement were limited, and most families navigated low-wage seasonal work and cramped housing — unsurprisingly, a lot of these issues can be traced back to Thatcher’s deindustrialisation policies, cuts to public spending and her erosion of local welfare provisions. In _Exploration of the Soul_ (1994), Emin documents in agonising detail childhood set against this world, from her conception to her rape at thirteen. Traumatised, this would cause her to drop out of school shortly after.\n\nEmin’s other most affecting work details her surgical experiences. Before getting the all clear from cancer, she had her bladder, womb, urethra, parts of her intestines, and lymph nodes, as well as half of her vagina, removed in 2020. It’s hard looking at all of this — especially given Emin’s claims that her recovery gave her a ‘second chance’ at life — without an overwhelming sense of gratitude that we have free healthcare in the UK, a decade of Conservative-led attacks on the NHS.\n\nIn _How It Feels_ (1996), Emin tells the camera about how a doctor had ‘refused to sign the papers’ for her to have an abortion after telling her what a wonderful mother she would make: ‘I felt pretty vulnerable. I was so broke, homeless, in debt. I had worked so hard at my education and coming from my background.’ Emin then explains that the abortion almost killed her. In light of Reform and the party’s candidates’ attempts to float around conspiracy ideas about the ‘implosion’ of the ‘British family’, because ‘many women in Britain are having children much too late in life’, Emin’s words feel all the more prescient. These comments followed the long-fought battle for decriminalised abortion in the UK, finally won last year; of the 123 MPs who voted against the Bill, only fifteen weren’t Tories.\n\nHow, then, did Britain’s most famously transgressive artist become their poster girl for a decade or so? ‘Well it wasn’t that I was voting Tory,’ Emin clarified in a _Guardian_ interview last month, ‘it was that I was voting for certain ministers that were supporting the arts.’ This may well have been true, but the former Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt and Arts Minister Ed Vaizey were unable to stop the giant cuts imposed by then-Chancellor George Osborne, who presided over Arts Council England’s 30 percent funding cuts between 2010 and 2016.\n\nEven then, votes don’t exist in a vacuum, nor did Emin’s very public support for Cameron. The latter also followed her protests against Labour’s raised tax increase on income over £150,000 in 2009, when she threatened to leave the country to avoid paying it. Thankfully, though, Emin has since backtracked a little with her calls for the rich to help fund museums to make them free for the public. She also called Johnson a ‘twit’ and, of Blair and Cameron, said that it ‘really aggrieves me to know that I supported both of these men. All I know is that with both of these actions, we are in such a mess.’\n\nEmin’s reflexive claims to non-partisanship are all well and good. But, given how much of her work is state-of-the-nation stuff, it makes it substantially harder for her to rebuff questions of political responsibility. Further, the subject of (a)political art has been so widely discussed in recent weeks that I think it’s impossible to abstract Emin from the historical context in which she produced hers. What began most prominently with Sally Rooney’s support for Palestine Action in December was followed by director Wim Wenders telling filmmakers to stay out of politics at February’s Berlinale. After substantial backlash, the BRIT Awards last month saw renewed calls for political artmaking from Wolf Alice, Wet Leg, Self Esteem, Loyle Carner, and more. Irish singer CMAT was rightfully vexed by Wenders’ comments: ‘more than ever, art is politics because you don’t get to make art in a fascist state. Fascism is on the rise in every single country in the world.’\n\nAs the art historian and writer Eliza Goodpasture points out, Emin has generally resisted ‘expressing a desire for radical liberation larger than herself.’ Sure, Emin might not have set out to become a political artist, and certainly not a feminist one. But the magisterial power of her work has always been its ability to turn private anguish — poverty, abuse, mental health struggles, and a traumatic abortion, all documented in _A_ _Second Life_ — into transpersonal matter. Making art about these subjects at a time when it was virtually unprecedented for women to do so _is_ , unavoidably, political. Perhaps in time, Emin will be more willing to accept that her art is as much about the political stakes of its era as it is about herself, regardless of who she’s voting for.\n\n* * *",
  "title": "Tracey Emin’s Political Responsibility",
  "updatedAt": "2026-03-11T09:37:40.000Z"
}