Tracey Emin
First published 15 August 2012
First published in guardian.co.uk on 9 May 2012
I was walking down the street the other day and Damien Hirst happened to be walking the other way. We passed. Not a thing! He acted as if he didn’t know me. I couldn’t believe it. So I decided to get my own back with this cartoon. How does it feel eh? Not too good. No, not too good at all.
The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama and Damien Hirst did indeed have retrospectives at the same time in Tate Modern, as I have chronicled before in the only 2-parter cartoon I have yet done, here and here. I’m not sure about the rest of the world but in England Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin are very big news and get loads of mainstream press coverage, almost as much as that other favourite artist of the press, David Hockney. The idea that one affected not to have heard of the other tickled me. Oh, and in real life Damien Hirst actually does own Nick Serota. I once heard him howling from inside the Hirst mansion – he was late for his walk apparently. He must have been busting, poor thing.
First published in guardian.co.uk on 16th May 2011
This cartoon was prompted by the thought – what if sex chat lines were, like most other things, outsourced to call centres abroad?
I sometimes come up with a joke, as on this occasion, that has nothing to do with art. I then try to think if there is an appropriate artist to slot into it. Luckily for me the artworld has strange, silly stuff by the bucketload so it’s normally not a problem. Tracey Emin fitted the bill here, with her (often) sexualised ditties written in neon tubing. She’s a bit stuck for ideas in my version…
By the way, I would be very surprised if there is a more interesting place on earth than India. I spent three months travelling there in 1991 and realised the best way to describe it is that it is a human rainforest. No monoculture here. It has every variant of humanity you can think of – religion, caste, language, wealth, health, food, colour – and lots and lots of it. Every day I could count on seeing something completely unexpected: almost tripping over the head of a begging holy man buried up to his neck in the sidewalk; monkeys jumping from shop awnings to steal fruit in busy city streets; squeezing my bicycle up sideways against the rickshaw in front of me to avoid being trampled by 2 angry camels pulling a cart; a jubilant crowd parading a well-dressed man on a throne who I realised, as he passed right next to my bus window, was not very alive. There’s a real mythic dimension to India and I absolutely dug it. However, 1991 was a long time ago and people tell me it has changed dramatically. So ask someone else before you buy a ticket.
First published 2nd Nov 2011