Tracey plans her legacy: an Emin Museum for all
NOT content with turning her famous unmade bed into a totemic work of British modern art, Tracey Emin now has plans to become immortal on her deathbed, I can reveal.
She says she wants much of the archive from her studio to be on display in a private museum which she is in the early stages of building in Margate, after being forced to move out of her London studio because planning permission for a five-storey studio extension was refused in February.
‘My studio is going to become a large office archive when I die,’ Tracey, 53, said last week at the Hay Festival.
‘The archive will be available to everyone to have access to in terms of preservation. Everything will be left to people to use. It’s very important to me.’
It appears that Emin had intended her London studio to be a museum, which is why she has relocated her plans to Margate. ‘I’m in the process of moving studio so I’ll have a giant studio and hopefully that can become a museum of some kind, I’m thinking about the future,’ she added. Croydon-born Tracey has not yet started building in artists paradise Margate, where there is already a Turner contemporary gallery, as she is looking for land to build on.
Emin’s most famous work, My Bed, was sold to a private collector for £2.5 million in 2014, although she received none of the proceeds. Last month, the National Portrait Gallery bought her Death Mask, which could be loaned to the Emin Museum.
Her philanthropic gesture is down to her having no children, she told the Hay Festival, adding that her legacy will be for the country rather than her family.
Although Emin has never married, last year she wed a volcanic stone to make a statement, saying that unlike a husband ‘it will never let me down’.
On her choice not to have children, she has said: ‘I don’t think I’d be making work [if I were a mother].
‘It would be a compromise to be an artist at the same time.’
One way to keep her reputation high is to have her works always on display. No better way than an Emin Museum.