Sunday, 16 July 2000
How much would you pay for a bed? And what if the price included soiled linen, some empty vodka bottles, a used condom and a pair of bloodstained knickers?
How much would you pay for a bed? And what if the price included soiled linen, some empty vodka bottles, a used condom and a pair of bloodstained knickers?
The answer is around £150,000, if you are the advertising guru and art collector Charles Saatchi - even if the bed in question was slept in by someone who once said she couldn't stand you.
He has just bought My Bed by Tracey Emin, the most controversial work of art since Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde.
Emin says she spent four days in the bed contemplating suicide. Saatchi has bought it for the next in a series of exhibitions called Ant Noises at his gallery in north London. They also feature the work of other now-ageing "young British artists" such as Hirst and Sarah Lucas.
The acquisition marks a thaw in the relationship between the volatile artist who some call "Mad Tracey from Margate" and the great patron of BritArt, who once paid £40,000 for Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1994, a tent embroidered with the names of Emin's 102 lovers.
She had protested against the idea of her art being owned by the man whose advertising expertise had kept Mrs Thatcher in power. But, at 37, she appears to be mellowing. In this month's Tatler magazine, Emin says she knew she had matured when "I was at Vivienne's [Westwood] party, Mrs Thatcher was there and I didn't spit at her."
Emin and Saatchi are believed to have made up after meeting at yet another party. She now says she is "very chuffed" about the sale. Saatchi has also bought several other of her works lately. My Bed made her the bookies' favourite for the Turner Prize last year, and was the centrepiece of the nominees' show at Tate Britain in Pimlico that broke all records with 2,000 visitors a day.
It was even the target for art terrorism, when two Chinese men jumped on to the bed half-naked and had a pillow fight. Their motives were never fully explained.
The prize went to the video artist Steve McQueen but Emin said the media fuss had already earned her enough to buy a house.
"Art is not my strong point," she said. "Life is." Her life story, which apparently includes leaving school at 13 and being raped, is the subject of all her art. The love-tent was part of Saatchi's Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, which brought BritArt to the height of its notoriety all over the world.
After Sensation, Emin became a household name, and lent her face to an advertising campaign for Bombay Sapphire gin. She was the subject of a BBC documentary, and blurred the lines between fiction and angst-ridden autobiography with a book called The Exploration of the Soul.
But My Bed is not the most valuable of the BritArt works. In May a Swiss firm paid $552,500 for Out of Sight, Out of Mind, a pair of severed cow's heads in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst.
