Editing Tracey Emin (section)

==Confessional nature of Emin's work==
While studying painting at the Royal College of Art Emin became disenchanted with the art of painting, "the idea of being a bourgeois artist, making paintings that just got hung in rich people's houses was a really redundant, old fashioned idea that made no sense for the times that we were living in."<ref name="Tracey Emin - The South Bank Show">{{cite web|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxaoAy9oNtY|title=Tracey Emin – The South Bank Show|access-date=10 May 2016|publisher=YouTube}}</ref> She felt there was no point in making art that someone had made decades or centuries before her, "I had to create something totally new or not at all". When asked by a reporter, when she decided that her life 'as Tracey Emin' was going to be her art, she replied '"I realised that I was much better than anything I'd ever made".<ref name="Tracey Emin - The South Bank Show"/>

Roberta Smith of ''[[The New Yorker]]'' says the following about Emin's work: "In her art she tells all, all the truths, both awful and wonderful, but mostly awful, about her life. Physical and psychic pain in the form of rejection, incest, rape, abortion and sex with strangers figure in this tale, as do love, passion and joy."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions/1999-05-01_tracey-emin/press/162|title=Tracey Emin – Every Part of Me's Bleeding|date=1 May 1999|access-date=10 May 2016|publisher=lehmannmaupin.com|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160506015614/http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/exhibitions/1999-05-01_tracey-emin/press/162|archive-date=6 May 2016|url-status=dead|df=dmy-all}}</ref>