Tracey Emin takes swipe at Damien Hirst: Artist says 'bad boy of British art' and his male counterparts become less of a creative 'force' at age of 40 By Les Roopanarine Published: 06:59 EDT, 15 October 2024 | Updated: 07:25 EDT, 15 October 2024 e-mail 8 View comments He was once the king of controversy in the British art world, but Damien Hirst has been declared a spent force by Dame Tracey Emin – who believes all male artists suffer a creative decline in their 40s. Hirst, 59, shot to fame in the 90s with controversial works such as Mother and Child, Divided, a formaldehyde sculpture consisting of the severed carcasses of a cow and a calf. Like Emin, 61, who forged her reputation in similarly eyebrow-raising fashion with works like My Bed, with its stained sheets and discarded condoms, Hirst was in the vanguard of the Young British Artists movement that spawned in London in the late 1980s.
But Emin feels the certitude and power that characterised her YBA contemporary’s early work has faded, a development that she sees as inevitable among male artists when they reach middle age. ‘I think it's really hard to be an artist,’ Emin said. ‘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.’ .
