'It caused so much upset': Why Tracey Emin's messy bed shocked the art world in the '90s - then became an icon
Artist Tracey Emin became famous in 1999 after a piece of art depicting a messy divan covered in condoms and beer cans caused a media frenzy. Why? What then took place? In the early years of the twenty-first century, creative culture was undergoing a revolution of its own. London itself was changing, and the Young British Artists (also known as YBAs) were a wild constellation of up-and-coming artists (including Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Jake and Dinos Chapman) who represented a collisional energy: rock 'n' roll, visual art, and nightlife. All of a sudden, the art scene was making headlines across the world, and it seemed that the most scandalous and contentious statement of all was about a woman's bed.
Warning: This article features language that some may find offensive
My Bed (1998) by Tracey Emin, which was shown in Tate Britain's stately gallery and shortlisted for the coveted Turner Prize in 1999, depicts a soiled divan with stained sheets, littered with personal belongings like Polaroid selfies, slippers, bloody period pants, empty vodka bottles, and an overflowing ashtray. It reenacted a depressed episode that had occurred after a breakup, during which Emin had spent days in bed before getting out to see the mayhem.
The Guardian newspaper lamented "Emin's unquenchable thirst for probing the sordid corners of her own existence"; My Bed, despite not winning the prize, definitely stole the show and caused a stir for its untidy candour; "Unmade Bed Exhibit Has London Tossing And Turning," according to the LA Times; the "stomach Turner" was criticized by the Daily Mail. In a 2014 BBC interview, Emin described her work as "half like a crime scene, half like a diary"—a more astute description.
I am looking at My Bed in 2026. A Second Life: Emin's new career-spanning show at Tate Modern, a London landmark that did not exist when this sculpture was produced, features it as a key focal point. It is a reunion that is surprisingly sad and incredibly vivid. When I first saw Emin's art in my adolescence in the 1990s, I remember being both fascinated and perplexed since it was so difficult to concentrate amid the media frenzy.
Pop culture was exciting, brazen, and sex-obsessed, but it was also prudish and misogynistic: well-known (especially working-class) women like Emin were praised as hard-partying "ladettes" and then condemned for their hedonism. Growing up as a woman in that era was extremely disorienting. Men were not held to the same standards, and the most startling media of all seemed to be menstrual blood. It seems good to let go of such burden decades later, but My Bed still has unquestionable power. Emin said, "I think people are so used to seeing it as an image that they forget that it is real," in a 2014 interview with the BBC. "You can see the trace of a human being there, so even when they see it for real, it still invokes those sensations inside them."Working closely with Emin (now 62, and the survivor of life-altering cancer) and her studio director Harry Weller, Tate Director Maria Balshaw says, "It felt really significant to bring the full range of Tracey's work back into the public eye; there are generations who know her name but have not had the chance to witness her art themselves." Balshaw co-curated A Second Life with Jess Baxter and Alvin Lee.
