It’s just not done to exhibit drawings of yourself scribbled with the words “Fuck me like a man” or neon lights spelling out “My cunt is wet with fear”, and even less to discuss your two abortions.Some have questioned whether such apparent unmediated outpourings can constitute art And yet there is so clearly artistry involved. She carried on swearing on live TV, accused critics of earning money off her back, and worse, continued to reveal the abject details of her past and present life in her art.It is the brutally direct way in which she communicates these details and opinions in her work that, I suspect, upsets so many of the male critics. What I think attracted visitors was not just the romance and nostalgia of the subject matter (the sleeping partners listed included friends and family as well as sexual conquests), but the fact that here was an artist who managed to convey her story in a way which is honest and direct, as well as beautiful and touching.The same directness, this time used to express a more painful experience, attracted even bigger crowds when My Bed – a sordid recreation of the site of a three-day breakdown – was exhibited (and desecrated) at Tate Britain in 2001 as part of Emin’s bid for the Turner Prize. Visitors and more enlightened critics saw something original in her framed autobiographical writings and mementoes (including a crumpled fag packet prised from the hand of her Uncle Colin after he was killed in a car crash) and she gathered a modest circle of admirers.However, it wasn’t until her tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95, was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s “Sensation” in 1997 that her reputation reached out further.

She grew up in Margate and has described her early years in the hotel run by her parents as idyllic, but says it all went wrong when her father walked out and the hotel went bust. She was raped when she was 13 and afterwards became a promiscuous teenager. Not surprisingly, her education suffered and she left school with no O-levels. But – and this is an achievement rarely acknowledged by her detractors – she joined a fine art course at Maidstone College and graduated in 1986 with a first-class degree. She followed this with an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art (RCA).The establishment environment at the RCA appears to have sapped Emin’s creative urge and she gave up making art for the next four years.

But in 1993, after an exchange of letters with the dealer Jay Jopling, she was invited to exhibit at White Cube, his tiny gallery in St James’s. She called the show “My Major Retrospective” because she thought she would never have a chance to exhibit again Instead, it turned out to be a new beginning. And what irritates her detractors most is that she just won’t pipe down.The oft-recounted story of how Emin came to be Britain’s most famous living artist reads like a classic Dickensian tale of rags to riches, but with plenty of fresh twists. Emin was born in London in 1963 to an English mother and an errant Turkish Cypriot father, who kept a second home for his wife and other children. She’s just no good.” When he later accused her of sending him junk mail in revenge she responded with a denial and a threat: “He’s pervy and creepy …