ART SCHOOL

Tracey Emin’s Bed Is Getting Its Very Own Comedy Drama Special

‘In Bed with Tracey Emin’ will trace how the seminal artwork came to be.


Tracey Emin's My Bed at Christie's - London
Nick Ansell/Getty Images

For four days straight in the late ’90s, the artist Tracey Emin holed up in bed and subsisted solely on alcohol. When she finally emerged from the bout of crippling depression and post-breakup fog, Emin turned the experience into a seminal work of art, meticulously recreating her bedroom right down to detritus like condoms, empty vodka bottles, cigarettes, slippers, a pregnancy test, and underwear stained with menstrual blood.

Now, Emin’s four-day bender is once again inspiring new work. On Wednesday, Deadline announced that the Sky network has ordered a one-off comedy drama about the work, as part of its ongoing Urban Myths series. Starring the comedian Morgana Robinson, In Bed with Tracey Emin will apparently be a “surreal telling” of Emin’s process creating the work. (It’s an interesting choice, to say the least; perhaps Robinson will be chugging vodka and dirtying up a set of sheets?)

A close up of Tracy Emin’s 1998 piece ‘My Bed.’

Rob Stothard/Getty Images

Tracey Emin’s 1998 piece ‘My Bed.’

Rob Stothard/Getty Images

Then again, it’s been two decades, and there’s yet to be a dull moment for My Bed. To say that it caused an uproar when it moved into the Tate in 1999 would be an understatement: The museum eventually had to heavily guard the exhibit after visitor reactions like a housewife who acted on her perceived “duty to clean up the mess.” That it was nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize only made matters worse: Critics denounced Emin as “endlessly solipsistic,” and Britain’s culture secretary felt compelled to publicly accuse the prize’s jury of giving the country a bad name abroad. Naturally, the tabloids took things up another notch: “For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilizing forces,” one critic wrote in the Daily Mail. “Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all.”

Related: Tracey Emin’s Stone Age