Art is something you can make, maybe a bit more creative than making furniture or a building but still something from nothing other than out of the vapour of our minds. It’s also intensely personal which is why we sometimes have to explain it and why it makes sense to me but not you.

I can speak as a writer far better than visual artist. For me as writer, fiction and poems are the artist’s attempt to work out a problem, or just explore an issue, using the characters and plot (which is best as the interactions of these characters). I don’t really know why visual artists produce their work, but I suspect it’s similarly a personal response to the world and other people, when it’s good art. Bad art often comes from a “pay attention to me” from the “artist.”

Only decent things I have produced are when I approach it with a little humility, or it’s a gift. Great a answer, you win. :thumbsup:

So what Ms. Emin does is “art” ? Emin as an artist who “put her period panties on the wall and called it art”. ( Quote from the Guardian)

I tend to agree with Richard Dorment’s view of her (Art Critic for the Telegraph) :

Emin’s confessional unmade bed was short-listed in autumn 1999 for the Turner Prize. Charles Saatchi bought the piece for £150,000 and allegedly put it in a room in his own home. The Guardian called it the “birth of a phenomenon” and ran with the headline “How this bed turned from work of art to modern icon in less than two weeks”.

But this paper’s critic, Richard Dorment calls Emin a “phoney”. In 1999 he wrote: “Emin shows memorabilia amassed during the course of a life marked by promiscuity, rape, abortion, alcohol abuse and financial destitution, but also by phenomenal critical and financial success, achieved by marketing graphic descriptions of her most intimate feelings and degrading experiences as works of art. Billing herself as a modern day Expressionist, Emin brings life — in the forms of videos and things taken from the real world — into the art gallery and leaves it there, more or less unchanged, like unprocessed sewage. . . .What interests me about Emin is not her relentless self-absorption, limitless self-pit or compulsion to confess the sad details of her past life, but that all of this adds up to so little of real interest”.

Craig Brown wrote a satirical piece about My Bed for Private Eye entitled ‘My Turd’.

Or is this art ?

or this ?

I believe what you think of as “art” is yours to behold and determine. If she is ground-breaking and leading the way – I am so happy to be going somewhere else. From my view – this is “emperor’s new clothes” stuff with savvy snake-oil salesman ( Saatchi et al) supporting the secondary art market for massively wealthy morons.. Maybe anything one can post or hang or display is art.. I’m cool with that..

I wonder why you post figures Dave, again and again in an art forum about the realistic figure ? And it’s apparently not even an art-form you like or enjoy (?) I think you have once written that is to give others an example of what not to do ( I am only paraphrasing).. But then you suggest people do not actually learn to draw realistically who want to do so.. Why do you do that ? Maybe you are too smart for the room ? Maybe posting in AB-Ex forums may be a better place ? You mention – to quote you “a serious ” art school – one that doesn’t actually teach much other than how to be part of the 21st century art swindle.. Is that good ? You are happy about this ?

I’ll take this one painting over the whole heap of art that Tracy Emins has graced the world with..