Tracey Emin has said that most male artists including her contemporary Damien Hirst are less of a creative “force” after they reach the age of 40.
Both Emin and Hirst have been Turner prize nominees, with Hirst winning the prestigious award in 1995, with his formaldehyde-preserved cow and calf, called Mother and Child, Divided, the focal piece of his exhibition that year.
But Emin, 61, known for her headline-grabbing 90s works including Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 and My Bed, said Hirst was no longer what he used to be.
“I think it’s really hard to be an artist. I think it’s really difficult,” she told Spotify’s The Louis Theroux Podcast.
“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.”
Emin added that men “sort of peak in their 40s”, 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”.
As an example, she cited the France-born artist Louise Bourgeois, who worked until she died aged 98 in 2010.
“Like now, if you look at [painter] Joan Mitchell, she’s undoubtedly one of the greatest American abstract painters ever, better than Jackson Pollock,” she continued.
But Emin refused to be dragged “down a hole that I don’t want to go” to discuss the popular street artist Banksy.
Earlier this year, the Guardian revealed that three Hirst sculptures that were made by preserving animals in formaldehyde were dated by his company to the 1990s even though they were made in 2017. It was also revealed that at least 1,000 paintings that the artist said were “made in 2016” were created several years later.
Emin, who was given a damehood in the king’s birthday honours list for her services to art earlier this year, also said she likes the “pomp and ceremony of the royal family” and believes the UK should embrace it.
“I would never, ever, ever want or wish to be part of the 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,” she said.
In 2020, the artist was diagnosed with bladder cancer after discovering a tumour while working on a painting of a malignant lump.
She underwent surgery which resulted in many of her reproductive organs being 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, Emin brought along her stoma sack in a Victoria Beckham-designed bag.
“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,” she said.
Emin 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. “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,” she said.
“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.”
