Tracey Emin Tells Louis Theroux  Damien Hirst Peaked In His 40s

Tracey Emin in today’s episode of The Louis Theroux podcast

In an exclusive interview with Louis Theroux, artist Tracey Emin stated that male artists like Damien Hirst peaked in their 40s, whereas women artists like Louise Bourgeois worked until she died at the age of 97. See Full Interview Below

Louis: Can I ask you about your contemporaries? Or is that going to be… is that going to annoy you? So you’re often grouped in with the other big name of the YBA generation, Damien Hirst. Thoughts?

Tracey: …I think it’s really hard to be an artist. I think it’s really difficult. 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. 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.

Louis: We didn’t really arrive anywhere with Damien Hirst, what you think he’s lost?…you just don’t like the work, is that what it is?

Tracey: No its not that. Its just like I think a lot of male artists in general, I always say this, men they sort of peak in their forties. They have just one, its like one massive ejaculation

Louis: It’s a nice image

Tracey: 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. Like Louise Bourgeois, 97, she stopped working. She stopped working the day she died.

Women have the capacity of doing that as long as they’re given the opportunity to do it. I think a lot of men peak in their 40s and women continue. So maybe Damien peeked, I don’t know, we’ll have to see, only time will tell…its not clear.

Like now, if you look Joan Mitchell, for examples, she’s like undoubtedly one of the greatest American abstract painters ever, better than Jackson Pollock.

Louis: Joni Mitchell, the musician?

Tracey: Joan Mitchell, the painter

Louis: Oh okay, cut that bit out

Tracey: Keep that bit in

Louis: Um, Banksy?

Tracey: No, we’re not going there. You’re trying to drag me down a hole that I don’t want to go. I don’t mind arguing, I don’t mind difficult things…Banksy’s a brilliant street artist, okay. Globally well known, gives lots to charity, very generous person. There you go.

Emin on the Royals and her candid account of meeting King Charles post-surgery

Louis: We were going to talk about the second time we met at Buckingham Palace. I feel weird even saying that sentence. I’ve never been invited to Buckingham Palace before. I’d never met the king. So for me, it was like, okay, this is a one off.

Louis: Would you consider yourself a royalist?

Tracey: Would you consider yourself a royalist?

Louis: Not really

Tracey: You looked very happy shaking King Charles’s hand the other day

Louis: How dare you, that’s embarrassing

Tracey: I like all the pomp and ceremony of the royal family, a lot. I love it. I think Britain, at the moment definitely doesn’t do many things well. That, we’re always going to be number one in. So I think rather than lose something we’re really good at, why don’t we embrace it and find the right position for it and use it and keep it and enjoy it because it’s quite splendid. It’s quite amazing. It’s quite, quite brilliant. And also, I would never, ever, ever want or wish to be part for royal family, when you see what they have to do and how they live and how restricted their lives are, I think it’s like a kind of living hell.

Louis: You had your bag with you, right? And um, I since learned what might have been in the bag. Can we talk about that?

Tracey: Yeah…I had a Victoria Beckham pool string bag and inside that I had my night bag, which is full of urine.

Louis: Can we talk about your cancer diagnosis?

Tracey: So I went to a gynaecologist to find out that I wasn’t well at all, that I actually had full blown squamous cell cancer in my bladder… And just one thing led to another, it just got worse and worse. And then within four weeks or whatever, I was having radical surgery. And I’m lucky to be alive

…Yeah, it was life changing and also to have a urostomy, people mix it up with a colostomy. So it’s not a poo bag, It’s a wee bag and the wee comes out all the time, constantly. And the reason why I can sit here now without my night bag is because I haven’t drank hardly anything today. And 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.

Louis: Yeah spraying wee all over the King… It’s like an Irvine Welsh situation (both laugh)

Tracey Emin talks about declining to be on one of Louis Theroux documentary series in 2001:

Tracey: You asked me to be on your program or you had asked me and you had a sort of Emperor’s New Clothes idea, like slightly piss take. So I wouldn’t do it.

Louis: Right…that would have been a year or two later when I was probably doing the, When Louie Mets and anyone in the public eye, I thought, let’s have a go.

Tracey: I was really, really in the public eye in those days, really a lot. And it was, you know, tabloids, all kinds of things, all the wrong things. And you were just going to make it worse for me. That’s what I thought. So I didn’t, but I liked you and I respected, I liked the way you made your programs and things. I thought you were interesting person, but I didn’t want to do it because a lot of people had an angle against contemporary art then, which I thought was wrong.

Louis: Fair enough. That’s happened quite a few times and in fact you were in quite good company in turning me down for a TV profile, that was the more normal reaction. It was always a surprise when people said yes. It was a bit like, what the hell?

Tracey reminds Louis about the story of how they first met, which includes travelling to a Brits after party on a rickshaw to meet Eminem, only to “Sack him off” for Donny Osmond:

Louis: We should let the listeners know that we’ve met twice, right? Once was in 2001 at the Brit Awards. I don’t remember that much about the whole event. Do you?

Tracey: Yeah, I remember everything.

Louis: Go on.

Tracey: You asked me if I wanted to go to the after party.

Louis: Yeah.

Tracey: We went in a rickshaw underground from one bit of Earl’s Court to another, and then we popped up and you tried to get me to meet Eminem.

Louis: And then, this is embarrassing, but I think I might have come on with that whole thing of, come on, modern art, what’s it all about?

Tracey: Yeah, you did. But I thought you were a nice person, and we were having a lot of fun. When we got to the VIP area, we wanted to meet Eminem, because my name’s Emin. We thought it was funny.

Tracey:  We were supposed to stand in this sort of like atrium area waiting to be seen…So we were the next in, but then from the corner of your eye you happen to see Donny Osmond.

Louis: Okay. Yes, that I do remember.

Tracey: And then we spent about an hour talking to Donny Osmond. And then we forgot about Eminem.

Louis: We sacked off Eminem

Tracey: we did. And we had a great chat with Donny Osmond. And it was really interesting.

The Louis Theroux Podcast is available on Spotify now.

Top Image Tracey Emin in today’s episode of The Louis Theroux podcast Courtesy Spotify

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