Several months ago, one Saturday evening, I nearly tripped over Tracey Emin in a branch of an Italian restaurant chain near Liverpool Street station. I thought this was quite impressive, a sign of the artist keeping in touch with commoners and trying to live a life outside the celebrity bubble.
It just shows how wrong you can be. She’s jumped on that bandwagon that normally carries the likes of Phil Collins or Jim Davidson and has started whinging about how somebody as rich as her can’t really be expected to pay 50% tax. She makes a sophisticated and persuasive argument. “I’m simply not prepared to pay tax at 50 per cent”. That’s because half of a huge amount of money is not really enough to get by on and it leaves her feeling undervalued.
Her solution is that of the greedy rich person through the ages. She might move to somewhere with a tax regime more sympathetic to the artist’s need for oodles of money. In her case it’s France. “At least in France their politicians have always understood the importance of culture and they have traditionally helped out artists with subsidy and some tax advantages.”
She also trots out that other favourite canard of the rich when the state tries to separate them from a little bit of their dosh to pay for hospitals and schools. “There aren’t enough incentives to work hard.” Maybe she could try getting by on what you make after sixty hours cleaning on the minimum wage.
It’s not easy to work out if Emin is developing a fully rounded world view. It could be that she is trying to hold onto some shred of her former radical self when she says “we should never have got involved in either Iraq or Afghanistan” or she’s just another self publicising money grubber spouting off the first thing that comes into her head. Hard to say really.
Liam redux 
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