Artists who say: welcome to the museum of me

Tracey Emin and I are in the morgue. At least, it used to be a morgue — a small Victorian brick structure once used for salt-sodden sailors drowned at sea, soon to become a catering school with pop-up restaurants, if Emin’s plans come to fruition. (She will be aided by the fundraising sale later this week of her recent picture “Like a Cloud of Blood” at Christie’s.) But in an earlier version of her design for the small campus she owns in Margate, the formerly shabby seaside town where she grew up, the morgue was going to be a museum of her.

“I thought the morgue would make a good little museum building and then I realised I was still alive, I don’t need a museum,” she says. “When I’m dead, I’ll need something, but right now I need life, I need things to be alive around me.” After a touch-and-go experience with cancer, Emin is gulping down life but still has death in her rear-view mirror: instead of a morgue-museum today, she has decided her nearby studio and living quarters will become a more substantial museum after her death.

There are, I suggest, quite a number of reasons she might be planning a museum: control of her legacy; a fear of neglect by major museums; a political statement about the defunding of the arts; a triumphant return to Margate; a love of art? She seizes quickly on control: “Absolutely, 100 per cent. Control. I’ve even got a list of people I don’t want my work to be shown with when I’m dead. When you’re alive, you can say no, yes, whatever, but when you’re dead, that’s it.” She says she doesn’t want her art to be displayed as badly in museums as Donald Judd’s.

“For an artist, it’s not a conceited, narcissistic thing, it’s natural because I love and care about art and care specifically about my own.”

She is not alone: other British artists such as Gilbert & George and Glenn Brown are working on galleries featuring their own work which will be open to the public. Damien Hirst has shown his own work, as well as others’, in his Newport Street Gallery in south London, and Anish Kapoor is doing similar in a palazzo in Venice he is renovating. After a period of popular and commercial success hardly seen by British artists since the Victorian era, when GF Watts, Frederic, Lord Leighton and architect John Soane opened museums to themselves, today’s gallery-builders are staking their claim to a place in both art history and urban life.

In London’s East End, off Brick Lane, dotted with bagel bakeries, curry houses and designer chocolate shops, Gilbert & George are converting a brewery into the Gilbert & George Centre. It will be “a place for fans and visitors from across the world to convene and always be able to see a Gilbert & George exhibition”, says the centre’s spokesperson.

When I interviewed Gilbert & George last year, George Passmore said the centre was driven by a focus on their legacy: “We wanted to find a way that we can live forever.” They seemed disgruntled that Tate had at least two dozen of their works “that they never show”, said Gilbert Prousch. “All the museums now are woke,” he complained. “It’s all black art, all women art, all this art and that art.”

Nevertheless, Gilbert & George have found a salve in the Brick Lane space, which will be filled with work they have kept back over their career. This might seem like a safe, economical way to hang a gallery, but it has to be weighed against the opportunity cost of not selling pictures when demand was high and money tight.

That’s a trade-off Glenn Brown is familiar with. The Brown Collection, which officially opens in a Marylebone townhouse this week, is filled with works he has retained even though, he says, “it’s always a bit of a sacrifice, financially, to keep a painting, but you have to — it’s really important”. (He has also bought some pictures back for the gallery.) This means the townhouse, with walls gorgeously decorated in museum greens and blues, has work from across his career.

Brown, who is represented by Gagosian, says his gallery is in part a response to a schedule that means he might only get a London show once a decade: “I make things that are an act of communication, and if people aren’t on the receiving end of that communication, then it just isn’t working.” 

Speaking in his bright white Old Street studio, where his swirling, classically inflected paintings sit on easels, almost ready for a show at Gagosian in New York, Brown sees something similar enabling him, Emin and Gilbert & George. “It would probably be that slightly punk ethos” which Gilbert & George in the 1960s and Brown and Emin in the 1980s had to adopt. “It’s DIY, fundamentally — you set things up, you organise things and you do it yourself.”

Could it also be to do with the fact that none of them has children who can be expected to safeguard their legacy? “That’s hugely important . . . This is like having a child that you’re raising — financially, as well.” Emin says something similar: “I don’t have children, I don’t have a partner, I don’t have a husband, I don’t have a wife, I have no one, nothing, so I have to find a place for everything to go.”

In all these spaces, posterity poses a difficult question: how do you keep them going in perpetuity? The Gilbert & George Centre says it has a board of trustees “to ensure that the centre is a permanent gallery space for London and its community” and will look to create “a more diversified income stream derived from shop merchandise and hosting one-off events”, while Brown intends to hand it over to a charity which can do with the space and the pictures as it wishes after his death: “I’m not determined that it should be there for all eternity.”

Back in Margate, Emin gets the final word, talking about her educational project. “This is my legacy, this is not about my ego, this is not about my work, this is about art, that’s my legacy, art, full stop, A-R-T.” She gets firmer. “My own little museum up the road, that’s my business, that’s for when I die, but it’s not yet. This is my legacy. So get that straight, get that right in your story.”

Tracey Emin’s ‘Like a Cloud of Blood’ is being sold at Christie’s on October 13, christies.com. The Brown Collection is on Bentinck Mews, London, glenn-brown.co.uk. Gilbert & George’s gallery is planned to open in the coming months, gilbertandgeorge.co.uk