Review - Tracey Emin, Those who suffer Love (White Cube, London)

I'm an Emin fan, there's no point denying it, and I can find it irritating when she gets class-based flak from snobby art-critics (the Artworld is a fundamentally vacuous term which means as little as the halfwits who constitute it). Even when I haven't enjoyed certain pieces of her work, I have retained an admiration for her attempts to bare her life, her warts, her subconscious. That brutal honesty is something I love, and aspire to. And, to me, My Bed is the greatest artwork of the last ten years.

In spite of this, I really struggled with Those who suffer Love, which is essentially a drawings show, part new and part retrospective, including work from as early as 1991. I'm afraid to say I could only bear to stay in the exhibit for about 15 minutes. On the plus side, there were three fantastic neon signs - the third, in luminous, beatific pink spewing out bilious poetry: 'I wanted you to fuck me, and then I became greedy, I wanted you to love me'. I suppose that these simple, terse statements shot through by bright light appealed to me on a direct, visceral level - they seemed to be the only pieces on show that did so, evoking that raw, painful honesty which I admire so deeply about Emin.

And yet, other than a few large woven canvases, the rest was dire. The centrepiece appeared to be a series of drawings depicting a woman masturbating, corresponding to a looped video of this at the exhibit's entrance. I stood there indifferent, as a 25 year-old might when placed in front of hardcore porn against his will (OK, an admittedly very rare occurence), unsure of how to react....bored. I couldn't see the point. It wouldn't surprise me if some reviewers subsequently made pithy jibes about this exhibit being little more than 'wank' - to be fair, I thought pretty much the same thing. Literal and lateral self-indulgence can be good, but there are limits. I think Emin has breached hers with this exhibition.

4/10.