During an appearance on The Louis Theroux Podcast in October 2024, Tracey Emin lobbed a characteristic provocation into the cultural discourse. Reflecting on the trajectory of her own career and that of her peers, the artist suggested a stark gender divide in creative longevity. Men, Emin observed, “sort of peak in their 40s.” In contrast, she argued that women “just tend to come and come and come and come and come,” sustaining a relentless evolutionary drive well into their later years.
To illustrate her point, Emin took aim at her most famous contemporary from the Young British Artists (YBA) movement: Damien Hirst. She noted that while Hirst was a monumental “force” who possessed immense conviction as a young artist, “now he’s not.” It was a blunt assessment of a peer, but it raises a profound structural question about the lifecycle of an artist. Is the perceived mid-career plateau of the male artistic genius a biological reality, a psychological trap, or merely an economic illusion created by a market obsessed with youth and conceptual novelty?
The assertion that male artists burn out while female artists embark on a slow, enduring burn requires us to look beyond the anecdotal evidence of the YBA generation. By examining the mechanics of the contemporary Visual arts market alongside rigorous academic research into human creativity, we can decode why Emin’s observation feels so instinctively accurate – and why the underlying causes are far more complex than simple gender dynamics.
The Cult of the Young Conceptualist
To understand Emin’s critique of Hirst, one must first understand the specific ecosystem that birthed them both. In the 1990s, the YBAs completely dismantled the traditional British art establishment. They did so not through decades of quiet mastery, but through sudden, explosive conceptual strikes. Hirst’s 1991 piece, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living – a shark suspended in formaldehyde – was the ultimate expression of this ethos. It was brash, immediate, and intellectually complete the moment it was conceived.
The art market inherently rewards this type of early, spectacular breakthrough. When a young artist produces a radical conceptual leap, the financial infrastructure of galleries, auction houses, and collectors rushes to institutionalise it. The artist is immediately canonised, their early works become definitive, and enormous pressure is applied to replicate that initial shock value.
For an artist like Damien Hirst, whose early work was defined by a razor-sharp interrogation of mortality and value, reaching one’s forties presents a unique crisis. How does one maintain the posture of an enfant terrible while sitting atop a vast corporate art empire? As chronicled in his later career developments, Hirst’s transition into mass-producing spot paintings and diamond-encrusted skulls often felt less like artistic evolution and more like brand management. The initial “force” Emin described had calcified into a highly lucrative predictability.
Conceptual Geniuses vs. Experimental Masters
While Emin attributes this trajectory to gender, the economist David Galenson offers a compelling alternative framework that perfectly explains the phenomenon she identified. A professor at the University of Chicago, Galenson spent years quantitatively analysing the life cycles of creativity. In his seminal book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses, Galenson used empirical data – such as auction prices and the frequency of works appearing in art history textbooks – to prove that artists fall into two distinct categories: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators.
Conceptual innovators work deductively. They start with a clear, specific idea and execute it decisively. Because their work is driven by radical new ideas rather than accumulated technical mastery, conceptual artists typically produce their most valuable and historically significant work very early in their careers. Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns are classic conceptualists. Damien Hirst is perhaps the ultimate contemporary example. Their “peak” in their twenties, thirties, or early forties is not a failure of stamina; it is the natural lifecycle of a conceptual methodology. Once the paradigm is broken, the conceptualist often struggles to find a second idea as powerful as their first.
Experimental innovators, on the other hand, work inductively. They rarely have a clear objective when they begin. Instead, they proceed through trial and error, constantly revising, observing, and struggling with their medium. Their art is a lifelong accumulation of knowledge and emotional depth. Because this process requires decades of persistence and refinement, experimental artists almost always produce their greatest works late in their lives. Paul Cézanne and Willem de Kooning are prime examples of this archetype.
Emin’s critique on The Louis Theroux Podcast aligns flawlessly with Galenson’s economic theory, but she maps it onto a gender divide. Are women naturally experimentalists, and men naturally conceptualists? Not inherently. However, the historical exclusion of women from the upper echelons of the commercial art market has meant that female artists have rarely been afforded the luxury – or the curse – of becoming early-career conceptual superstars.
The Slow Burn: Why Women Dominate the Late Career
If the market refuses to canonise you in your twenties, you are forced into an experimental methodology by default. You must continue to work, evolve, and persist without the immediate validation of blockbuster auction results. This structural reality has forged generations of female artists whose greatest achievements occurred decades after the age at which men supposedly peak.
Emin herself cited Louise Bourgeois as the ultimate example of female creative longevity. Bourgeois worked in relative obscurity for much of her life, navigating the patriarchal dominance of the mid-century art world. It was only in her later years that she received global institutional recognition. In 1999, at the astonishing age of 88, Bourgeois created Maman, the towering, 30-foot steel and marble spider that has since become one of the most iconic sculptures of the modern era. Maman was not the product of a sudden, youthful epiphany; it was the culmination of an eighty-year psychological excavation of maternal trauma, memory, and protection.
Similarly, the abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell produced her most vibrant, expansive, and critically acclaimed multi-panel paintings in the final decade of her life. Cuban-American minimalist Carmen Herrera sold her first painting at the age of 89, having spent over six decades quietly perfecting her geometric abstractions in her New York apartment. When Herrera passed away in 2022 at the age of 106, she was widely recognised as a master of hard-edge abstraction – a peak she reached fifty years after the age at which Emin suggests men plateau.
Emin’s own career arc mirrors this experimental trajectory. While she achieved early notoriety with works like My Bed (1998), her recent output has demonstrated a profound deepening of her practice. Following a severe battle with bladder cancer and major surgery in 2020, Emin’s work has stripped away the confrontational irony of her YBA youth. Her recent paintings are visceral, urgent, and technically masterful explorations of the vulnerable, failing human body. She has not rested on the laurels of her early conceptual shocks; she has used the trauma of her fifties and sixties to fuel an entirely new, arguably superior, era of creation.
The Market Pressure on the Male Ego
Emin’s suggestion that male artists lose their “force” post-forty must also be examined through the lens of ego and institutional expectation. When a male artist achieves massive commercial success early on, the ecosystem built around him demands continuity. The gallery needs inventory; the collectors want recognisable assets.
This creates an incredibly hostile environment for experimental risk-taking. If a male artist in his forties abandons the highly profitable style that made him famous, he risks commercial alienation. It takes immense bravery to dismantle a successful formula and start again. Many choose the safer route: self-emulation. The artist becomes an artisan of his own brand. The work becomes larger, more expensive to produce, and often entirely devoid of the vital friction that initially defined it.
Women artists, historically operating with less to lose commercially, have possessed the freedom to evolve. Without the golden handcuffs of early institutional anointment, the female artist’s studio remains a site of genuine inquiry rather than a production line. The relentless “coming” that Emin describes is the result of a career built on necessity and internal compulsion, rather than market demand.
Rethinking the Zenith
Tracey Emin’s remarks on The Louis Theroux Podcast may have been characteristically blunt, but they pierced the veil of a rarely discussed reality in the art world. We are conditioned to worship the prodigy, the disruptor, and the young genius. Yet, as the data from economists like David Galenson and the lived experiences of artists like Louise Bourgeois demonstrate, the most profound artistic achievements often require a lifetime of incubation.
Emin’s assertion is less an attack on male artists and more a damning indictment of how success is structured and sustained in contemporary culture. The tragedy of the male conceptualist is that he is encouraged to sprint a marathon, exhausting his creative capital before middle age. The triumph of the female experimentalist is that she is built for the long haul.
As the art market gradually shifts to properly value the depth and resilience of late-career female artists, the definition of a “peak” is fundamentally changing. The narrative is no longer solely about the young radical tearing down the establishment. Increasingly, it is about the older master, weathered by life and unbothered by the market, who proves that true creative force is not a sudden explosion, but a fire kept burning over decades.
