Tracey Emin: Male artists like Damien Hirst ‘less of a force’ after their 40s

She also spoke about why she did not wish to be interviewed by Louis Theroux in the 2000s.

Tracey Emin attends the re-opening of the National Portrait Gallery in London, following a three-year refurbishment programme. The gallery has undergone a major transformation since closing its doors in March 2020, the biggest since the building opened 127 years ago. Picture date: Tuesday June 20, 2023. (PA Archive)

Dame Tracey Emin suggested that most male artists including Damien Hirst are less of a “force” creatively after they reach the age of 40.

The 61-year-old is a contemporary of Hirst, and they have both been Turner Prize nominees, with him taking home the prestigious art award in 1995 for his formaldehyde-preserved cow and calf, called Mother and Child, Divided.

Dame Tracey, known for her headline-grabbing 90s works Everyone I Have Ever Slept With And My Bed, told Spotify’s The Louis Theroux podcast: “I think it’s really hard to be an artist. I think it’s really difficult.

“I think people who don’t make art or don’t attempt to be an artist, don’t understand how difficult it is to have that conviction, that self-belief and everything.

“Damien was a young artist that started off with a lot of that belief and a lot of that conviction. He was like a force. And now he’s not.”

The artist added that men “sort of peak in their forties”, while “women just tend to come and come and come and come and come, so as a woman, you carry on coming all your life until you’re old”.

She cited France-born artist Louise Bourgeois, who kept working until she died aged 98 in 2010, as an example of a woman who has kept going.

Dame Tracey also said: “Like now, if you look (at the painter) Joan Mitchell, for example, she’s like undoubtedly one of the greatest American abstract painters ever, better than Jackson Pollock.”

However, the artist refused to be dragged “down a hole that I don’t want to go” to talk about popular street graffiti maker Banksy.

Dame Tracey also told Theroux that she had been concerned when he was doing his When Louis Met… documentary series that art would be treated as a joke.

She said: “I was really, really in the public eye in those days, really a lot. And it was, you know, tabloids, all kinds of things, all the wrong things.

“And you were just going to make it worse for me. That’s what I thought. So I didn’t, but I liked you and I respected, I liked the way you made your programmes and things.

“I thought you were an interesting person, but I didn’t want to do it because a lot of people had an angle against contemporary art then, which I thought was wrong.”

During a discussion about the 1997 Turner Prize on Channel 4, she interrupted critics, swearing, and walked out, saying: “I’m leaving now. I want to be with my mum.”

Dame Tracey was given a damehood in the King’s Birthday Honours list for her services to art earlier this year.

She also said she likes the “pomp and ceremony of the royal family”, and thinks the UK should embrace it.

Dame Tracey added: “I would never, ever, ever want or wish to be part for royal family, when you see what they have to do and how they live and how restricted their lives are, I think it’s like a kind of living hell.”

In 2020, she was diagnosed with bladder cancer after discovering a tumour while working on a painting of a malignant lump.

The artist underwent surgery which saw many of her reproductive organs removed and she was fitted with a stoma bag, and later unveiled a new collection of nudes for a show called A Journey To Death, which she said was a response to her health issues.

When attending Buckingham Palace to meet the King and Queen, Dame Tracey brought along her stoma sack in a Victoria Beckham-designed bag.

She said: “The reason why I had to have my night bag plugged in and my shopping bag when we met the King is because these things take time and you don’t know how long it’s going to take for them to come down the stairs and the last thing I want to do is be standing there ready to meet the King and Queen and then have to beforehand rush to the loo or my bag burst.

“That would be really embarrassing.”