Tracey Emin The Feminist Capitalist

“The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"

Sigmund Freud

In mid March 2006, I watched What Price Art on channel 4, in which Tracey Emin explored the issue of the prices fetched by women artists in comparison to male artists. In the 1970s courses like Women's Studies propagated endless thesis and later biographies on neglected female artists. Those artists it highlighted Artemisia Gentileschi, Gwen John, Modersohn-Becker, and Frida Kahlo were good third-rate artists but not geniuses - you could easily pick a hundred forgotten male artists just as good if not better. It is a cold fact that the history of art is 99.999% dominated by dead white male western artists. This fact is a subject of intense outrage by people less interested in art and more interested in the gender, race, and religion of artists than in the actual quality of the art they make. In The Obstacle Race Germane Greer studied the history of female artists and concluded that while art history was full of female child prodigies - they never lived up to their early promise. The 1970s and 1980s saw a spate of women only exhibitions, which only further ghettoized women, and since most of the art exhibited was rubbish it did nothing to promote the cause of respect for women artists. Camille Paglia famously declared in Sexual Persona that there would never be a female genius like Mozart because there were not blood-lust killers like Jake the Ripper. Genius like psychopathic blood-lust killing she claimed was a peculiarly male phenomenon. Paglia claimed that feminist excuses for a lack of geniuses - like social neglect, prejudice or motherhood - were irrelevant because many great male artists faced prejudice, neglect, poverty and derision. I thought it was far too early in female emancipation to agree with this. And already many strong female artists had emerged like Louise Bourgeois and Paula Rego. But what really annoyed me about Tracey's utterly self serving and self-obsessed documentary  - was its reduction of art to money  - spawned as it was by her own anger that the likes of Damien Hirst's work sold for higher prices than her own. However, to me it was self evident that Hirst was an infinitely better artist than Emin and more importantly he was a far greater curator and promoter of the London Art scene. As far as I could tell, Emin had done nothing but promote herself and her art relentlessly for the past twenty years. Hirst on the other hand had worked in collaboration with others artists, and began his life as a curator of others artists work. Hirst along with Saatchi and Joplin made the London sense - Tracey just crashed it and screamed for attention.