The moment I saw it, I knew this was something that had come from the

Sir Nicholas Serota, chairman of the Turner Prize judges, has spoken vigorously in defence of the artists who took part. In this week's Private Eye, CRAIG BROWN imagines the Serota appraisal of a new exhibition from the notorious Tracey Emin - My Turd this intercontextuality, they fail to see that by a process of evacuation and exhibition, Tracey Emin has transformed what might have been "just a turd"

FRANKLY, I welcome the bravura debate engendered by so many of our most exciting young artists. It is by turns shocking, amusing, wry and deeply disturbing. And this is just one of the reasons I am looking forward to next year's My Turd exhibition by Tracey Emin.

Emin laid her Turd in midmorning -10.44am, to be exact - on 22 November. I count myself privileged to have been there when the work - rich, earthy dark browns and beige, soft and yielding yet somehow strangely visceral and concentrated emerged from the artist. The whole experience was, for me - perhaps even more so for Tracey - intensely moving.

The moment I saw it, I knew that this was something that had come from the very depths of her being, something raw and pungent, juxtaposing the old and the new, the roughage with the smooth, bold and real yet with infinite layers.

And the more I confronted it, the more I realised it would repay prolonged attention, as its layers slowly disclosed other layers.

And in confronting it, I knew for sure that, yes, Emin had indeed broken new ground, bringing something very hot and very pliable to contemporary art.

My Turd has a lot to say about birth and death, a lot to say about the nature of self, a lot to say about the whole process of defecation and renewal in contemporary society, and it has a hell of a lot to say about art itself. It is almost as if, in some extraordinary way, the artist were asking us to confront the very nature of what we call "shit". What is it?

Where is it? And who will buy it? For, studied closely, the gentle, almost classical contours of My Turd seem to echo the gentle curves of Poussin and Boucher, its deep dark browns and blacks gaining strength from comparison to the rich, earthy colours of Rembrandt and Goya. While firmly perched on the cutting edge of contemporary art, My Turd has its roots firmly buried in the past.

Advance bookings for My Turd have broken all records. Regardless of the critics, the public seems to welcome Tracey Emin's savage attack on the wheels of commerce and convention. To prove it, Channel 4 has already scheduled a tie-in Turd season, in which Waldemar Januszczak explores The Shock of the Poo, while minor Turds by Tracey Emin are already selling like hot cakes to private

dealers for more than 20,000 a piece and the Tate shop will soon be fully stocked with My Turd T-shirts, pencil sharpeners, calendars and desk diaries.

And already, all the committees I chair have voted it the exhibition of the year, even before seeing it.

This all goes to show that there is a tremendous appetite, particularly among the young, for the smouldering confrontation with inner reality. Yes, art should shock. Yes, art should be ugly. Yes, art should set out to unnerve and confront and challenge. This is what great art has always done and will always do. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of the history of art will know that, in their day, Sellafield and Centre Point were also dismissed by critics as "ugly" and "too modern". Why, even the beautiful mushroom cloud of Hiroshima was, at its opening, unfairly derided by critics as "horrendous" and - my favourite - "an ineradicable blot on our civilisation"(!). Yet today, Sellafield and Centre Point are acknowledged as seminal works, and Hiroshima continues to knock us backwards with its breathtaking force.

OF course, there will always be those who dismiss major new installations such as My Turd as in some way "not art"(!). Those very same people who happily admire the old-fashioned, chocolate-box charms of a Poussin or a Boucher will hold up their hands in shock at My Turd.

Why? We cannot simply write off these unfortunate sections of the population as absurd bourgeois tabloid philistines with no capacity for real feeling or thought. That would be to underestimate their ignorance.

For them, My Turd is just a turd. Due to lack of education in the visual arts, they are unable to place it in an historical context. Without this intercontextuality, they fail to see that by a process of evacuation and exhibition, Tracey Emin has transformed what might have been "just a turd"(!) into My Turd - something tremendously powerful and sacred. It seems to me that on a very basic level they simply have not made the necessary effort to comprehend what Tracey Emin is trying to do in this remarkable piece, with its soft, almost floating, lines and its peculiarly emergent sense of its own turdiness. And until they bother to make that effort, they will forever be excluded from right-minded society, unable to participate, even on the junior level, in the world of modern art.

A word or two about myself. When I see My Turd, I find myself deeply disturbed.

My views on the very nature of art and life are challenged.

1) Who am I? 2) What am I doing? 3) What is art? These are the sort of questions I am forced to ask. Art obliges us to answer these questions for ourselves.

But thankfully I soon get an answer to all my questions. 1) I am Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of the Tate, Chairman of the Turner Prize, internationally acclaimed as the most important man in British art. 2) I am giving My Turd a chance to breathe. 3) Art is what I say it is.

And though these questions may have been deeply disturbing, the answers give me quiet cause for satisfaction.

But many others are not, alas, quite so civilised as, after all this confrontation, I find myself to be. There are those who, seeing this work which sets out to shock, upset and disturb, write me letters complaining that they are shocked, upset my staff and attempt to cause no end of disturbance in the media. How gauche they must be to react like that!

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.