Creativity Quote by Tracey Emin

Trashy on the surface, razor-clean as a provocation. Tracey Emin takes the prim, public-health language of “just one condom” and flips it into an image of excess: “tons” isn’t a number, it’s a spectacle. The joke lands because it drags private behavior into public view, then refuses the polite scale we’re trained to use when talking about sex. It’s a deliberately coarse unit of measurement, as if intimacy could be weighed like industrial waste. That mismatch is the point.

Emin’s intent is less locker-room brag than a familiar Emin move: forcing the audience to confront how quickly we moralize bodies, especially women’s bodies, the moment sex is framed as abundance rather than romance. “Some people” sets up an imaginary norm - responsible, discreet, monogamous, hygienic. “But we” creates a counter-public, a campy collective that treats desire as messy, iterative, repetitive. The plural isn’t accidental; it’s solidarity and complicity, a refusal to be isolated as the “confessional” artist who’s supposed to feel shame.

In Emin’s orbit - the YBAs, tabloid scrutiny, the weaponization of autobiography - sex becomes both material and battleground. The line reads like a punchline, but it’s also a critique of risk narratives: condoms are framed as caution; “tons” makes them evidence of lived experience, negotiation, agency. It’s a wink that doubles as a dare: if you want authenticity, don’t demand cleanliness.