Artist Tracey Emin's unmade bed is to go on sale again, 15 years after it shocked the nation with both its price tag and its content. The messy installation, entitled My Bed, was based on what her bed looked like following a few days holed up there during a time of heartbreak.
Including tights, some slippers, a pair of knickers with period blood on them, condom wrappers and half empty-bottles of booze, was a realistic – yet to some, damning – representation of a young single woman in the late '90s (or for that matter, a young single woman right now). Making it into the Turner Prize shortlist in 1999 shot the bed into the minds and hearts of the sorts of people who wouldn't normally be so interested in art, and it also gave Tracey added kudos. It also brought a notoriety that meant Charles Saatchi bought the bed for £150,000.
As Saatchi now expects to sell it at auctioneers Christie's for between £800,000 and £1.2m, Tracey – who has since become so famous and successful that she's pretty much part of the establishment – went on Newsnight to talk about her breakout work.
If you can't watch it (damn you, work), she says it's 'like a kind of diary, nearly everything I'm touching is a million miles away from me now… That period of my life was highs and lows'.
Defending the work against its critics, she explains, 'With being an artist, if you have true conviction about what you're doing and you're doing it for the right reasons, no one can take that away from you.'
She also spoke of how important it was to have moved on from that stage in her life, saying, 'When I was going through all of these things – condoms, contraceptive pills, cigarettes, vodka, stains, tiny underwear. All of these things are to do with being a girl, and coming through some kind of transition of going through something, of some cathartic state.'
Isn't it nice that someone was around to document how women actually lived, what they were really up to, in the same year that something as basic as Sex And The Citywas considered pioneering for the way its characters talked about sex? And looking at Tracey's bed now makes us feel marginally a bit better about the state of our beds after a particularly, uhh... Busy week. Sorry, Mum.
Folow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Picture: Rex
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.