Art & Creativity Quote by Tracey Emin

There is a bleak comedy in the way Emin compresses an entire ecosystem of judgment into a single, pub-ready phrase: "slagged off". It’s not the lofty language of critique; it’s the language of being gossiped about, dragged, dismissed. The line stages her as both insider and target, someone close enough to the "art world" to crave its validation and contemptuous enough to call it what it often feels like: a clique with cultural power.

The specific intent is defensive, but not timid. Emin isn’t pleading for acceptance; she’s naming the mechanism of exclusion. "Completely" is the tell: absolute rejection is rarely true, but it feels true when you’re being filtered through taste-making institutions that can turn a career into a punchline. The subtext is a dare: if you want to reduce my work to scandal, confession, or celebrity, I’ll reduce your criticism to social bullying.

Context matters because Emin’s practice has always toyed with exposure and risk: the diaristic candor, the autobiographical mess, the refusal to sand down the raw edges into something palatable for museum respectability. That openness is both her currency and her vulnerability. The art world loves transgression until it becomes too legible, too popular, too emotionally direct - then it calls it unserious. By framing the backlash as "slagging off", Emin smuggles in a class critique too: she refuses the genteel codes of art-speak and reminds you that status games are still just games, even when they’re played in white cubes.