Creativity Quote by Tracey Emin

Emin’s “What is truth?” isn’t a cozy postmodern shrug; it’s a defensive flare shot from a life’s worth of being doubted, pathologized, and turned into material by other people’s gazes. Coming from an artist whose work trades in autobiography as spectacle, the line reads less like philosophy than like boundary-setting: you don’t get to cross-examine my pain just because I put it in a gallery.

The move that makes the quote work is its pivot from abstraction to power. “Truth doesn’t really exist” sounds like relativism until the next sentence reframes the real issue: adjudication. The target isn’t truth as a concept; it’s the social machinery that decides whose version counts. In a culture that treats confession as content and trauma as evidence, Emin refuses the courtroom setup. She’s not claiming every story is equally accurate. She’s claiming the judging itself is corrupted: institutions, critics, partners, tabloids, even the audience. “No one can be trusted” lands like a scar tissue conclusion, not a debate proposition.

There’s also an artist’s gambit embedded in it. Emin’s practice often collapses the line between fact and narrative, diary and performance. By denying an external arbiter, she protects the legitimacy of subjective experience while also defending art’s right to be messy, contradictory, and emotionally true even when it’s not documentarily verifiable. The quote stakes out a politics of testimony: if truth is what power certifies, then refusing the judge is its own kind of resistance.