I found Tracey Emin’s “A Second Life” exhibition at Tate Modern irritating at first because you have to read paragraphs of her handwriting. But the payoffs are huge. “My Future” ends with “That’s the last Dead Thing to Leave my body” (her extracted dead tooth 
!), which in the context of the life she lays bare leaves you gasping.
The quilted blankets are as moving as ever (… if you read enough panels). Her paintings of figures with black or red marks in place of faces are intense, better perhaps than the William De Kooning figure paintings of which they remind me in my limited exposure.
The room showing her 1996 video “How it Feels” about her abortion was standing-room-only full of women. She goes deep on the inescapable fact that women are tied to their bodies, in ways men simply aren’t.
It was pure luck that the “Sensation” show was on at the Royal Academy in 1997 when I strolled in, including her tent “Everyone I Have Slept With 1963-1995”. I didn’t get the work then, I may never fully “get it,” but the show’s title didn’t lie.
