title: Government Pension Fund of Norway

text: Green energy is becoming an important aspect for the Government Pension Fund since fossil fuel stocks simply are not producing as much value as they used to. As of 2019, new guidelines will prohibit the fund from investing in companies that produce over 20 million tons of coal annually. The fund plans to sell off over $10 billion in stocks from companies using too many fossil fuels. In hopes of improving the Norwegian economy, the firm is becoming more environmentally-friendly by investing in companies that promote renewable energy. For example, the fund will continue to hold stakes in firms like Shell using renewable energy divisions.


title: Government Pension Fund of Norway

text: In March 2021, it was reported that the Government Pension Fund was examining whether companies in the fund had used forced labor from Xinjiang internment camps.


title: Government Pension Fund of Norway

text: On 1 December 2021, the fund's head of Governance and Compliance, Carine Smith Ihenacho, told Reuters that companies in its portfolio will be asked to take more specific action on climate change.


title: Government Pension Fund of Norway

text: The following companies have been excluded from the Government Pension Fund of Norway for activities in breach of the ethical guidelines:


title: Government Pension Fund of Norway

text: The fund does not announce exclusions until it has completed sales of its positions, so as not to affect the share price at the time of the transaction.


title: Government Pension Fund of Norway

text: Several previously excluded companies have later been reinstated to the fund because the companies were no longer involved in the activities that had led to their exclusion.


title: Government Pension Fund of Norway

text: As an alternative to full exclusion from the fund, companies may be placed "under observation" to help put pressure on the company to improve.


title: Government Pension Fund of Norway

text: In October 2010 the fund spent NOK 600 million ($136.4 million as of October 2010) daily buying foreign currencies. That figure would be increased to 800 million kroner daily in November. This practice was suspended in January 2011, and on 31 January it was announced that this would also be the case in February.


title: Government Pension Fund of Norway

text: The Government Pension Fund – Norway (, SPN) was established by the "National Insurance Act" () in 1967 under the name "National Insurance Scheme Fund" (). The name was changed at the same time as the former Petroleum Fund, on 1 January 2006. It continues to be managed by a separate board and separate government entity, still named . The Government Pension Fund – Norway had a value of NOK 240.2 billion at the end of 2017. Unlike the Global division, it is required to limit its investments to companies in the Norwegian stock market, predominantly on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The Fund is not allowed to own more than a 15% interest in any single Norwegian company.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Tracey Karima Emin, CBE, RA (; born 3 July 1963) is a British artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 1997, her work "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995", a tent appliquéd with the names of everyone the artist had ever shared a bed with, was shown at Charles Saatchi's "Sensation" exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London. The same year, she gained considerable media exposure when she swore repeatedly in a state of drunkenness on a live discussion programme called "The Death of Painting" on British television.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 1999, Emin had her first solo exhibition in the United States at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, entitled "Every Part of Me's Bleeding". Later that year, she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited "My Bed" – a readymade installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed, in which she had spent several weeks drinking, smoking, eating, sleeping and having sexual intercourse while undergoing a period of severe emotional flux. The artwork featured used condoms and blood-stained underwear.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin is also a panellist and speaker: she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2010), the Royal Academy of Arts (2008), and the Tate Britain in London (2005) about the links between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In December 2011, she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy; with Fiona Rae, she is one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin was born in Croydon, a district of south London, to an English mother of Romanichal descent and a Turkish Cypriot father. She was brought up in Margate, Kent, with her twin brother, Paul.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin shares a paternal great-grandfather with her second cousin Meral Hussein-Ece, Baroness Hussein-Ece. This ancestor, Abdullah, was reportedly a Sudanese slave in the Ottoman Empire.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Her work has been analysed within the context of early adolescent and childhood abuse, as well as sexual assault. Emin was raped at the age of 13 while living in Margate, citing assaults in the area as "what happened to a lot of girls."


title: Tracey Emin

text: She studied fashion at Medway College of Design (now part of the University for the Creative Arts) (1980–82). There she met expelled student Billy Childish and was associated with The Medway Poets. Emin and Childish were a couple until 1987, during which time she was the administrator for his small press, Hangman Books, which published Childish's confessional poetry. In 1984 she studied printing at Maidstone Art College (now part of the University for the Creative Arts). She graduated with a first class degree in Printmaking. Also, whilst at Maidstone college of Art, Tracey Emin encounters Roberto Navikas, a name which was later to feature prominently in her "tent" (see below).


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 1995, she was interviewed in the "Minky Manky" show catalogue by Carl Freedman, who asked her, "Which person do you think has had the greatest influence on your life?" She replied, "Uhmm... It's not a person really. It was more a time, going to Maidstone College of Art, hanging around with Billy Childish, living by the River Medway".


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 1987, Emin moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where in 1989 she obtained an MA in painting. After graduation, she had two traumatic abortions and those experiences led her to destroy all the art she had produced in graduate school and later described the period as "emotional suicide". Her influences included Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele, and for a time she studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.


title: Tracey Emin

text: One of the paintings that survive from her time at Royal College of Art is "Friendship", which is in the Royal College of Art Collection. Additionally, a series of photographs from her early work that was not destroyed was displayed as part of "My Major Retrospective".


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 1993, Emin opened a shop with fellow artist Sarah Lucas, called "The Shop" at 103 Bethnal Green Road in Bethnal Green, which sold works by the two of them, including T-shirts and ashtrays with Damien Hirst's picture stuck to the bottom.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In November 1993, Emin had her first solo show at White Cube, a contemporary art gallery in London. It was called "My Major Retrospective", and was autobiographical, consisting of personal photographs, photos of her (destroyed) early paintings, as well as items which most artists would not consider showing in public (such as a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when he was decapitated in a car crash).


title: Tracey Emin

text: In the mid-1990s, Emin had a relationship with Carl Freedman, who had been an early friend of, and collaborator with, Damien Hirst, and who had co-curated seminal Britart shows, such as "Modern Medicine" and "Gambler". In 1994, they toured the US together, driving in a Cadillac from San Francisco to New York, and making stops en route where she gave readings from her autobiographical book "Exploration of the Soul" to finance the trip.


title: Tracey Emin

text: The couple spent time by the sea in Whitstable together, using a beach hut that she uprooted and turned into art in 1999 with the title "The Last Thing I Said to You is Don't Leave Me Here", and that was destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire.


title: Tracey Emin

text: The result was her "tent" "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995", which was first exhibited in the show. It was a blue tent, appliquéd with the names of everyone she has slept with. These included sexual partners, plus relatives she slept with as a child, her twin brother, and her two aborted children.


title: Tracey Emin

text: The needlework which is integral to this work was used by Emin in a number of her other pieces. This piece was later bought by Charles Saatchi and included in the successful 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy; it then toured to Berlin and New York. It, too, was destroyed by the fire in Saatchi's east London warehouse, in 2004.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin was largely unknown by the public until she appeared on a Channel 4 television programme in 1997, ""Is Painting Dead?"". The show comprised a group discussion about that year's Turner Prize and was broadcast live. Emin said she was drunk, slurred and swore before walking out. From the interview: "Are they really real people in England watching this programme now, they really watching, really watching it?"


title: Tracey Emin

text: Two years later, in 1999, Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize herself and exhibited "My Bed" at the Tate Gallery.


title: Tracey Emin

text: There was considerable media attention regarding the apparently trivial and possibly unhygienic elements of the installation, such as yellow stains on the bedsheets, condoms, empty cigarette packets, and a pair of knickers with menstrual stains. The bed was presented as it had been when she had stayed in it for several days, feeling suicidal because of relationship difficulties.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped onto the bed with bare torsos to "improve" the work, which they thought had not gone far enough.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In July 1999, at the height of Emin's Turner Prize fame, she created a number of monoprint drawings inspired by the public and private life of Princess Diana for a themed exhibition called "Temple of Diana" held at The Blue Gallery, London. Works such as "They Wanted You To Be Destroyed" (1999) related to Princess Diana's bulimia eating disorder, while other monoprints included affectionate texts such as "Love Was on Your Side" and a description of Princess Diana's "dress with puffy sleeves". Other drawings highlighted "The things you did to help other people" written next to a drawing by Emin of Diana, Princess of Wales in protective clothing walking through a minefield in Angola. Another work was a delicate sketch of a rose drawn next to the phrase "It makes perfect sence to know they killed you" (with Emin's trademark spelling mistakes) referring to the conspiracy theories surrounding Princess Diana's death. Emin herself described the drawings, saying they "could be considered quite scrappy, fresh, kind of naïve looking drawings" and "It's pretty difficult for me to do drawings not about me and about someone else. But I have did have a lot of ideas. They're quite sentimental I think and there's nothing cynical about it whatsoever."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Elton John collects Emin's work, as did George Michael. Michael and his partner Kenny Goss held the "A Tribute To Tracey Emin" exhibition in September 2007 at their Dallas-based museum, the Goss-Michael Foundation (formerly Goss Gallery).


title: Tracey Emin

text: This was the inaugural exhibition for the gallery which displayed a variety of Emin works from a large blanket, video installations, prints, paintings and a number of neon works including a special neon piece "George Loves Kenny" (2007) which was the centrepiece of the exhibition, developed by Emin after she wrote an article for "The Independent" newspaper in February 2007 with the same title. Goss and Michael (died 25 December 2016), acquired 25 works by Emin.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Other celebrities and musicians who support Emin's art include models Jerry Hall and Naomi Campbell, film star Orlando Bloom who bought a number of Emin's works at charity auctions and pop band Temposhark, whose lead singer collects Emin's art, named their debut album "The Invisible Line", inspired by passages from Emin's book "Exploration of The Soul". Rock legend Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones is a well documented friend of Emin whose own paintings are inspired by Emin's work. In 2004 Emin presented Madonna with the "UK Music Hall of Fame" award.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin was invited to Madonna's country estate Ashcombe and has been described by the singer, "Tracey is intelligent and wounded and not afraid to expose herself," she says. "She is provocative but she has something to say. I can relate to that." David Bowie, a childhood inspiration of Emin's, also became friends with the artist. Bowie once described Emin as "William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Like the George Michael and Kenny Goss neon, Emin created a unique neon work for her supermodel friend Kate Moss called "Moss Kin". In 2004, it was reported that this unique piece had been discovered dumped in a skip in east London. The piece, consisting of neon tubing spelling the words "Moss Kin", had been mistakenly thrown out of a basement, owned by the craftsman who made the glass. The artwork was never collected by Moss and had therefore been stored for three years in the basement of a specialist artist used by Emin in the Spitalfields area. It was accidentally dumped when the craftsman moved. The term used in the work "Kin" is a recurring theme of Emin's to describe those dear to her, her loved ones. Other examples can be seen in a monoprint called "MatKin" dedicated to her then boyfriend artist Mat Collishaw and released as an aquatint limited edition in 1997. Emin created a nude drawing of Kate Moss known as "Kate" (2000), signed and dated as "1 February 2000" in pencil by the artist. In 2006 the same image was released as a limited edition etching, but renamed as "Kate Moss 2000" (2006). Emin's work was included in the 2022 exhibition "Women Painting Women" at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin's relationship with the artist and musician Billy Childish led to the name of the Stuckism movement in 1999. Childish, who had mocked her new affiliation to conceptualism in the early 1990s, was told by Emin, "Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! – Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!" (that is, stuck in the past for not accepting the YBA approach to art). He recorded the incident in the poem, "Poem for a Pissed Off Wife" published in "Big Hart and Balls" Hangman Books 1994, from which Charles Thomson, who knew them both, later coined the term Stuckism.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin and Childish had remained on friendly terms up until 1999, but the activities of the Stuckist group offended her and caused a lasting rift with Childish. In a 2003 interview, she was asked about the Stuckists:


title: Tracey Emin

text: From November 2002 to January 2003, Tracey Emin's solo exhibition "This Is Another Place" was held at Modern Art Oxford and marked the museum's reopening and renaming to Modern Art Oxford. The exhibition was Emin's first British exhibition since 1997. The exhibition contained drawings, etchings, film, neon works such as "Fuck off and die, you slag", and sculptures including a large-scale wooden pier, called "Knowing My Enemy", with a wooden shack on top made from reclaimed timber.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin commented that she decided to exhibit in Oxford as museum director Andrew Nairne had always been "a big supporter of my work". An exhibition catalogue included 50 illustrations: "a compilation of images and writings reflecting her life, her sexual experiences and her desires and fears."


title: Tracey Emin

text: On 24 May 2004, a fire in a Momart storage warehouse in East London destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection, including Emin's famous tent with appliquéd letters, "Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995" ("The Tent") (1995) and "The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here" ("The Hut") (1999), Emin's blue wooden beach hut that she bought with fellow artist Sarah Lucas and shared with her boyfriend of the time, the gallerist Carl Freedman. Emin spoke out angrily against what she perceived as a general public lack of sympathy, and even amusement, at the loss of the artworks in the fire. She commented, "I'm also upset about those people whose wedding got bombed last week [in Iraq], and people being dug out from under 400ft of mud in the Dominican Republic."


title: Tracey Emin

text: In August 2006, the British Council announced that they had chosen Emin to produce a show of new and past works for the British Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. Emin was the second woman to produce a solo show for the UK at the Biennale, following Rachel Whiteread in 1997. Andrea Rose, the commissioner for the British Pavilion, stated that the exhibition would allow Emin's work to be viewed "in an international context and at a distance from the YBA generation with which she came to prominence.".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin picked the title "Borrowed Light" for the exhibition. She produced new work especially for the British Pavilion, using a wide variety of media – from needlework, photography and video to drawing, painting, sculpture and neon. A promotional British Council flyer included an image of a previously unseen monoprint for the exhibition called "Fat Minge" (1994) that was included in the show, while the "Telegraph" newspaper featured a photo of a new purple neon "Legs I" (2007) that was on display (directly inspired by Emin's 2004 purple watercolour "Purple Virgin" series). Emin summed up her Biennale exhibition work as "Pretty and hard-core".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin was interviewed about the Venice Biennale by the BBC's Kirsty Wark in November 2006. Emin showed Wark some work-in-progress, which included large-scale canvases with paintings of Emin's legs and vagina. Starting with the "Purple Virgin" (2004) acrylic watercolour series with their strong purple brush strokes depicting Emin's naked open legs, leading to Emin's paintings in 2005-6 such as "Asleep Alone With Legs Open" (2005), the "Reincarnation" (2005) series and "Masturbating" (2006) amongst others, these works were a significant new development in her artistic output.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Andrea Rose, the British Pavilion commissioner, added to this commenting on the art Emin has produced, "It's remarkably ladylike. There is no ladette work – no toilet with a poo in it – and actually it is very mature I think, quite lovely. She is much more interested in formal values than people might expect, and it shows in this exhibition. It's been revelatory working with her. Tracey's reputation for doing shows and hanging them is not good, but she's been a dream to work with. What it shows is that she's moved a long way away from the YBAs. She's quite a lady actually!"


title: Tracey Emin

text: On 29 March 2007, Tracey Emin was made a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy of Arts. In becoming a member of the Royal Academy Emin joined an elite group of artists that includes David Hockney, Peter Blake, Anthony Caro and Alison Wilding. Her Academician status entitles Emin to exhibit up to six works in the annual summer exhibition.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin had previously been invited to include works at the R.A. Summer Exhibitions of 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004 and 2001. For 2004's Summer Exhibition, Emin was chosen by fellow artist David Hockney to submit two monoprints, one called "And I'd Love To Be The One" (1997) and another on the topic of Emin's abortion called "Ripped Up" (1995), as that year's theme celebrated the art of drawing as part of the creative process, while 2007 saw Emin exhibit a neon work called "Angel" (2005). Her art was first exhibited at the Royal Academy as part of the "Sensation" exhibition in 1997.


title: Tracey Emin

text: For the June 2008 Summer Exhibition, Emin was invited to curate a gallery. Emin also gave a public talk in June 2008 interviewed by art critic and broadcaster Matthew Collings, contemplating her role within the Royal Academy, the Academy's relationship to the contemporary art world, and her perspective, as an artist, on hanging and curating a gallery in the Summer Exhibition. She exhibited her famous "Space Monkey – We Have Lift Off" print at the 2009 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.


title: Tracey Emin

text: The first major retrospective of Emin's work was held in Edinburgh between August and November 2008 attracting over 40,000 visitors, breaking the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art's record for an exhibition of work by a living artist.


title: Tracey Emin

text: The large-scale exhibition included the full range of Emin's art from the rarely seen early work to the iconic "My Bed" (1998) and the room-sized installation "Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made" (1996). The show displayed her unique appliquéd blankets, paintings, sculptures, films, neons, drawings and monoprints. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art was the only UK venue for the show which then went to the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga, Spain and then to the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland from 2009.


title: Tracey Emin

text: It was reported on 6 November 2008 that Emin gifted a major sculpture to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art as a "thank you" to both the gallery and the city of Edinburgh. The work called "Roman Standard" (2005) comprises a bronze pole, surmounted by a little bird, cast in bronze. The work has an estimated value of at least £75,000.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In May–August 2011, a major survey exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery consisted of work from all aspects of Emin's art practice, revealing facets of the artist and her work that are frequently overlooked. The exhibition included painting, drawing, photography, textiles, video and sculpture, with rarely before seen early works alongside more recent large-scale installations. Emin made a new series of outdoor sculptures especially for this solo show.


title: Tracey Emin

text: On 6 October 2011, Emin opened a site-specific exhibition at a Georgian house on Fitzroy Square. The title is taken from her novel which has served as a catalyst for a series of works, created for a neoclassical house designed by Robert Adam in 1794. The exhibition also featured a series of embroidered texts and hand-woven tapestries which continued Emin's interest in domestic and handcrafted traditions. Emin herself has said that, "I called it that because I saw part of myself as drying and not there anymore and I wanted to question the whole idea of love and passion, whether love exists anymore...Why? Because I'm nearly 50, I'm single, because I don't have children."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin was a mentor on the "BA Great Britons Programme". She also produced a poster and limited edition print for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, one of only 12 British artists selected. On 19 July 2012, Emin carried the Olympic torch through her hometown of Margate.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In December 2020, Emin had a gallery exhibition containing works by Edvard Munch, entitled "The Loneliness of the Soul", at the Royal Academy of Arts. Emin selected 19 pieces of Munch's work to be displayed alongside 25 pieces of her own. Simultaneously, she had a show at London's White Cube gallery which included a short Super-8 film in tribute to Munch.


title: Tracey Emin

text: The exhibition was re-shown at the newly opened Munch Museum in Oslo, with Emin being the first artist to show alongside the Norwegian painter. Works included recent paintings, as well as her seminal work My Bed. Emin had suffered from cancer in the year before the exhibit, and was unsure whether she would be able to see it herself.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin's monoprints are a well documented part of her creative output. These unique drawings represent a diaristic aspect and frequently depict events from the past for example, "Poor Love" (1999), "From The Week of Hell '94" (1995) and "Ripped Up" (1995), which relate to a traumatic experience after an abortion or other personal events as seen in "Fuck You Eddy" (1995) and "Sad Shower in New York" (1995) which are both part of the Tate's collection of Emin's art.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Often they incorporate text as well as image, although some bear only text and others only image. The text appears as the artist's stream of consciousness voice. Some critics have compared Emin's text-only monoprints to ransom notes. The rapid, one-off technique involved in making monoprints is perfectly suited to (apparently) immediate expression, as is Emin's scratchy and informal drawing style. Emin frequently misspells words, deliberately or due to the speed at which she did each drawing. In a 2002 interview with Lynn Barber, Emin said, "It's not cute affectation. If I could spell, then I would spell correctly, but I never bothered to learn. So, rather than be inhibited and say I can't write because I can't spell, I just write and get on with it."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin created a key series of monoprints in 1997 with the text "Something's Wrong" or "There Must Be Something Terebley Wrong With Me" written with spelling mistakes intact in large capital letters alongside "forlorn figures surrounded by space, their outlines fragile on the page. Some are complete bodies, others only female torsos, legs splayed and with odd, spidery flows gushing from their vaginas. They are all accompanied by the legend "There's Something Wrong"."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Other key monoprints include a series from 1994 and 1995 known as the "Illustrations from Memory" series which document Emin's childhood memories of sexual awakening and other experiences growing up in Margate such as "Fucking Down An Ally 16/5/95" (1995) and "Illustrations from Memory, the year 1974. In The Livingroom" (1994). Emin further produced a set of monoprints detailing her memories of Margate's iconic buildings such as "Margate Harbour 16/5/95" (1995), "The Lido 16/5/95" (1995) and "Light House 15/5/95" (1995). Other drawings from 1994 include the "Family Suite" series, part of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art collection, consisting of 20 monoprints with "archetypal themes in Emin's art: sex, her family, her abortions, and Margate". This series of monoprints was displayed for the first time from August 2008 at the Edinburgh based gallery as part of her first major retrospective, which has been called the "Summer Blockbuster" exhibition. A further "Family Suite II" set was exhibited in Los Angeles in November 2007 as part of Emin's solo show at Gagosian gallery.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin's monoprints are rarely displayed alone in exhibitions, they're particularly effective as collective fragments of intense emotional confrontation. Emin has made several works documenting painful moments of sadness and loneliness experienced when travelling to foreign cities for various exhibitions such as "Thinking of You" (2005) and "Bath White I" (2005) which were from a series of monoprints drawn directly onto the USA Mondrian hotel stationery. Emin herself has said, "Being an artist isn't just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it's some kind of communication, a message."


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 2009, Emin along with book publisher Rizzoli released a book titled "One Thousand Drawings". As the title suggests, the book contains 1000 drawings of Emin's career since 1988. The book was released to coincide with Emin's show "Those who suffer love" at White Cube which was mainly a drawings show. Emin said in an interview that "We actually looked at about 2000 drawings and then chose 1000 drawings [for the book]... I'd probably done, over that period of time about 4000 drawings".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Monoprint drawings of mothers and children that Emin drew during a pregnancy in 1990 were included in a 2010 joint exhibition with Paula Rego and Mat Collishaw at the Foundling Museum.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Rarely exhibited examples of monoprints gifted to friends and family of Emin form a niche but revealing body of work. These may show Emin's work in the most raw and uncensored from. Emin has gifted monoprints to individuals including her brother Paul Emin and the singer Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) with whom she shares Cypriot heritage.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin displayed six small watercolours in her Turner Prize exhibition in 1999, and also in her New York show "Every Part of Me's Bleeding" held that same year, known as the "Berlin Watercolour" series (1998). These delicate, washed out but colourful watercolours include four portraits of Emin's face and were all painted by Emin in Berlin during 1998, adapted from Polaroids of the artist taking a bath. Each unique painting from this series share the same title, "Berlin The Last Week in April 1998". Simon Wilson, spokesperson for the Tate, commented that Emin included the set of tiny Berlin watercolours "as a riposte to the accusation that there are no paintings" in the Turner Prize exhibitions. The bath theme seen in these watercolours was later revisited by Emin in her photographic work "Sometimes I Feel Beautiful" (2000) and in monoprints such as the "Bath White" (2005) series. With all these works, Emin explores a Mary Cassatt quality of the "woman in a private moment".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin's focus on painting has developed over the past few years, starting with the "Purple Virgin" (2004) acrylic watercolour series of purple brush strokes depicting her naked open legs, and leading to paintings such as "Asleep Alone With Legs Open" (2005), the "Reincarnation" (2005) series and "Masturbating" (2006), among others.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In May 2005, London's "Evening Standard" newspaper highlighted Emin's return to painting in their preview of her "When I Think About Sex" exhibition at White Cube. Other works were nude self-portrait drawings. Emin was quoted as saying, "For this show I wanted to show that I can really draw, and I think they are really sexy drawings."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Work for her 2007 show at the Venice Biennale included large-scale canvases of her legs and vagina. A watercolour series called "The Purple Virgins" were displayed. There are ten "Purple Virgin" works in total, six of which were shown at the Biennale. These were accompanied by two canvases of a similar style called "How I Think I Feel 1 and 2". The Venice Biennale was also the first time Emin's "Abortion Watercolour" series, painted in 1990, had ever been shown in public.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Jay Jopling presented a new Emin painting, "Rose Virgin" (2007), as part of White Cube's stand at the Frieze Art Fair in London's Regent's Park on 10 October 2007. More new paintings are expected to be shown in Emin's "You Left Me Breathing" exhibition in Los Angeles' Gagosian gallery from 2 November 2007, described in a recent interview as an 'exhibition of sculpture and painting'. A number of new paintings were on display including "Get Ready for the Fuck of Your Life" (2007).


title: Tracey Emin

text: An article by the art critic Alastair Sooke, published in "The Daily Telegraph", in October 2014, discussed Emin's change of direction from conceptual pieces to painting and sculpture. Sooke claimed that although Emin was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy in 2011, she has been taking drawing lessons privately for some years in New York, and that she had also been taking sculpture lessons for at least three years. Neither Emin or Jay Jopling have commented on the article.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin has produced many photographic works throughout her career, including "Monument Valley (Grand Scale)" (1995–97) and "Outside Myself (Monument Valley, reading "Exploration of the Soul")" (1995) which resulted "from a trip Emin made to the United States in 1994. She and her then boyfriend, writer, curator and gallery owner Carl Freedman, drove from San Francisco to New York, stopping off along the way to give readings from her 1994 book, "Exploration of the Soul". The photograph shows the artist sitting in an upholstered chair in Monument Valley, a spectacular location on the southern border of Utah with northern Arizona, holding her book. Although it is open, it is not clear whether she is looking at the viewer or at the text in front of her. Emin gave her readings sitting in the chair, which she had inherited from her grandmother, which also became part of Emin's art, "There's A Lot of Money in Chairs" (1994)."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Other photographic works include a series of nine images comprising the work "Naked Photos – Life Model Goes Mad" (1996) documenting a painting performance Emin made in a room specially built in Galleri Andreas Brändström, Stockholm. Another photographic series, "Trying on Clothes From My Friends (She Took The Shirt Off His Back)" (1997), shows the artist trying on her friends' clothes offering up questions of identity.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Other works such as "I've Got It All" (2000) show Emin with her "legs splayed on a red floor, clutching banknotes and coins to her crotch. Made at a time of public and financial success, the image connects the artist's desire for money and success and her sexual desire (her role as consumer) with her use of her body and her emotional life to produce her art (the object of consumption)", while "Sometimes I Feel Beautiful" (2000) pictures Emin lying alone in a bath. Both these works are examples of her using "large-scale photographs of herself to record and express moments of emotional significance in her life, frequently making reference to her career as an artist. The photographs have a staged quality, as though the artist is enacting a private ritual."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin's two self-portraits taken inside her beach hut, "The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here I" (2000) and "The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here II" (2000) are a diptych although they are often exhibited and sold separately. They depict a naked Emin on her knees inside her beach hut which she and friend Sarah Lucas had bought in Whitstable, Kent in 1992.


title: Tracey Emin

text: The hut itself later became the sculpture "The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here (The Hut)" (1999). They are part of museum collections including Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and have been mass produced as postcards sold in museum shops around the world.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin has also worked with neon lights. One such piece is "You Forgot To Kiss My Soul" (2001) which consists of those words in blue neon inside a neon heart-shape. Another neon piece is made from the words "Is Anal Sex Legal" (1998). to complement another "Is Legal Sex Anal" (1998)


title: Tracey Emin

text: For the Venice Biennale, she produced a series of new purple neon works, for example, "Legs I" (2007). This 2007 series of "Legs" neon works were directly inspired by the "Purple Virgin" (2004) watercolour series. For example, "Legs IV" (2007) directly follows the watercolour lines of the "Purple Virgin 9" (2004). For a joint 2010 exhibition with Paula Rego and Mat Collishaw she decorated the front of the Foundling Museum with the neon words "Foundlings and fledglings are angels of this earth".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin has donated neon work to auction for charity and in 2007, her neon "Keep Me Safe" reached the highest price ever made for one of her neon works of over £60,000. A brand new neon piece called "With You I Want To Live" was shown as part of Emin's "You Left Me Breathing" exhibition in 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin frequently works with fabric in the form of appliqués – material (often cut out into lettering) sewn onto other material. She collects fabric from curtains, bed sheets and linen and has done so for most of her life. She keeps such material that holds emotional significance for later use in her work. Many of her large-scale appliqués are made on hotel linens, for example, "It Always Hurts" (2005), "Sometimes I Feel So Fucking Lost" (2005), "Volcano Closed" (2001) and "Helter Fucking Skelter" (2001). "Hate And Power Can Be A Terrible Thing" (2004), part of the Tate's collection of Emin's work, is a large-scale blanket inspired in part by Margaret Thatcher due to her involvement in "an attack on 800 boys and men in the Argentinian navy" and other women for example women who steals their friends' boyfriends, Emin says of this work "about the kind of women I hate, the kind of women I have no respect for, women who betray and destroy the hearts of other women".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin's use of fabric is diverse, one of her most famous works came from sewing letters onto her grandmother's armchair in "There's A Lot of Money in Chairs" (1994). The chair was very detailed, "including her and her twin brother's names, the year of her grandmother's birth (1901) and the year of her death (1963) on either side of the words another world, referring to the passing of time. An exchange between the artist and her grandmother using the nicknames they had for each other: ‘"Ok Puddin, Thanks Plum"’, covers the bottom front of the chair and a saying of Emin’s grandmother's, "There's a lot of money in chairs", is appliquéd in pink along the top and front of its back. Behind the chair back, the first page of "Exploration of the Soul", handwritten onto fabric, is appliquéd together with other dictums such as, ‘"It’s not what you inherit. It’s what you do with your inheritance"’".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin used the chair on a trip Emin made to the United States in 1994. Driving from San Francisco to New York stopping off along the way to give readings from her book, "Exploration of the Soul" (1994). Emin gave her readings sitting in the upholstered chair and "as she crossed the United States, the artist sewed the names of the places she visited – San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Monument Valley, Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York – onto the front of the chair". Emin also posed in the chair for two of her photographic works (see Photography) while in Monument Valley, in the Arizona Desert. It is currently on public display at Pallant House Gallery until 6 March 2011 as part of the exhibition, 'Contemporary Eye: Crossovers', pallant.org.uk. Retrieved 6 May 2016.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin has made a large number of smaller-scale works, often including hand sewn words and images, such as "Falling Stars" (2001), "It Could Have Been Something" (2001), "Always Sorry" (2005) and "As Always" (2005).


title: Tracey Emin

text: On 13 April 2007, Emin launched a specially designed flag made out of fabric with the message "One Secret Is To Save Everything" written in orange-red letters across the banner made up of hand-sewn swimming sperm. Tracey Emin's flag, at 21 feet by 14 feet, flew above the Jubilee Gardens in the British capital until 31 July 2007, with the parliament building and the London Eye as backdrops. Emin called the artwork "a flag made from wishful thinking". The flag was commissioned by the South Bank Centre in London's Waterloo.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In June 2007, on returning from the Venice Biennale, Emin donated a piece of artwork, a handsewn blanket called "Star Trek Voyager" to be auctioned at Elton John's annual glamorous White Tie & Tiara Ball to raise money for The Elton John AIDS Foundation. The piece of artwork sold for £800,000.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin's works on fabric has been related to other artists such as Louise Bourgeois, who Emin actually mentions in a sewn work called "The Older Woman" (2005) with the phrase (monoprint on fabric), "I think my Dad should have gone out with someone older like Louise, Louise Bourgeois". She was interviewed by Alan Yentob during the BBC's "Imagine" documentary "Spiderwoman" about Louise Bourgeois, aired in the UK on 13 November 2007.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin has often made use of found objects in her work from the early use of a cigarette box found in a car crash in which her uncle died. The most well known example is "My Bed", where she displayed her bed. Another instance is the removal of her beach hut from Whitstable to be displayed in a gallery. This work was titled "The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here (The Hut)" (1999). She revisited the theme of the bed in 2002, with the mixed media installation, "To Meet My Past" (2002), another installation with a four poster bed with embroidered text such as "Weird Sex" and "To Meet My Past" hanging down alongside the mattress.


title: Tracey Emin

text: She incorporated stones and rocks which had been thrown through her window in a mixed media piece in her 2005 show. The work consists of a monoprint of herself sitting on a chair with the stones lined up below the drawing in a vitrine. "The Leg" (2004) included a plaster cast inside a vitrine, kept by the artist after she broke her leg, exhibited alongside a C-print photograph of the artist wearing the cast.


title: Tracey Emin

text: "May Dodge, My Nan (1993)" is also an installation piece that displays relics of personal items significant to Emin . It was exhibited at the White Cube in Emins first solo show "My Major Retrospective." "May Dodge, My Nan" encompasses five condiments separately framed and mounted to the wall in the exhibition. Consisting of A handwritten page of manuscript, two relics and lastly two photographs. From left to right it views: Pasted onto a small paper doily is a magazine cut out of three kittens along with the caption too  ‘Timmy, Leo and Squashie posing beautifully for the camera’.As well as a small piece of card stuck onto a piece of blue wool which dangles making the shape of a handle below. A coloured photo of past photo of Emin holding a kitten standing next to her grandmother May Dodge sitting at a table in a Kitchen. A black and white photo of both Emin as a little girl and May Dodge her grandmother standing in a garden in the 1960s. A handmade scented pomander that resembles a doll that Emin’s grandmother made. The relic made up of sections of soft knitted white cotton fabrics and lace gathered together over its scented stuffing and topped with a plastic doll’s head. And lastly the hand written note by Emin herself in blue ink.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In February 2005, Emin's first public artwork, "The Roman Standard ", a bronze sculpture, went on display outside the Oratory, adjacent to Liverpool Cathedral. It consists of a small bird perched on a tall bronze pole, and is designed so that the bird seems to disappear when viewed from the front. It was commissioned by the BBC. "Emin's work stands outside The Oratory, in Upper Duke Street just outside the Cathedral. The Roman Standard – which features a small bird on top of a four-metre high bronze pole – is a tribute to the city's famous symbol the Liver Bird. The sculpture was commissioned by the BBC as part of their contribution to the art05 festival and Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture in 2008. Emin says the sculpture represents strength and femininity."


title: Tracey Emin

text: In September 2008 she unveiled a neon work that was "installed in the well of the cathedral" Emin herself says of her continuing relationship of making public sculptures in the town, "When Liverpool is Capital of Culture in 2008, I'll be making a large work for the Anglican Cathedral, which I'm really looking forward to."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Other sculptures have included "Death Mask" (2002) which is a bronze cast of her own head. Emin loaned this work to the National Portrait Gallery in 2005,


title: Tracey Emin

text: At Emin's 2007 "Venice Biennale" exhibition, as well as the central exhibition's "Tower" sculptures, tall wooden towers consisting of small pieces of timber piled together, a new small bronze-cast sculpture work of a child's pink sock was revealed "Sock" (2007) on display on the steps of the British Pavilion. Her exhibition again attracted widespread UK media coverage, both positive and negative.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In September 2007, Emin announced she would be exhibiting new sculpture work in the inaugural Folkestone Triennial which took place in the Kent town from June until September 2008. In June 2008 Emin discussed the Folkestone sculptures, stating the "high percentage" of teenage pregnancies in the Kent town had inspired this latest work. Emin said her contribution would be different pieces placed around the town, "I'm going to be making very tiny bronze-cast items of baby clothing. It's baby clothes that I have found in the street, like a mitten or a sock."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin's 2007 solo show at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles' Beverly Hills included brand new sculpture works described by Emin as, "some very strange little sculptures. They are nearly all of animals, apart from one, which is a pineapple. They rest on mini-plinths made in a really brilliant LA, beach, California, Fifties surfer kind of style. Different woods put together in cute pattern formations. In some places the wood is 18th-century floorboards, some bits of cabin from tall ships or things which could have been found on the seashore – driftwood." "The New York Times" included Emin in a piece about artists who are "Originals", with a new photograph with two sculptures, one of a small bird on a thin stand and a large seagull, both sculptures placed on wooden plinths. Gagosian further described the many different sculptures from the show as, "a group of delicate wood and jesmonite sculptures, which expand on the spirals, rollercoasters, and bridges of recent years. Others incorporate cast bronze figures – seagulls, songbirds, and frogs – or objects combining cement and glass, which are placed on tables or bundled bases made from found timbers."


title: Tracey Emin

text: In late November 2007, it was announced that Emin was one of six artists to have been shortlisted to propose a sculpture for the fourth plinth in London's Trafalgar Square. The other shortlisted artists were Jeremy Deller, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Yinka Shonibare, and Bob and Roberta Smith – the professional name of Patrick Brill.


title: Tracey Emin

text: The contenders were commissioned to produce a scale model of their idea. On 6 January 2008, it was revealed Emin's proposal was a lifesize model of a group of four meerkats, the desert mammal. Entitled "Something for the Future" it consisted of a sculpture of four meerkats "as a symbol of unity and safety" as "whenever Britain is in crisis or, as a nation, is experiencing sadness and loss (for example, after Princess Diana's funeral), the next programme on television is 'Meerkats United.'" The successful proposal were announced in 2008 as Gormley, whose project One & Other occupied the plinth in summer 2009 and Shonibare, and whose work "Nelson's Ship in a Bottle" was unveiled in 2010.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin’s latest project, commissioned by Oslo Municipality Art Programme, is a 7-metre-tall bronze sculpture, The Mother, to be unveiled on Museum Island, outside the new Munch Museum, when it opens in 2020. (http://www.themuseumisland.com/). From the jury’s assessment: ‘With its immediate and visceral artistic approach it appears both intimate and majestic, vulnerable and grandiose. The title The Mother refers to a mature protector and the sculpture brings to mind the ubiquitous motifs of women and the nude in Munch’s work. As a non‐idealised depiction of a woman made by a woman it can also be seen as a feminist statement.’


title: Tracey Emin

text: In the film, Emin describes leaving school at age 13 and spending her time on Margate's Golden Mile, dreaming and having sex. Sex "was something you could just do and it was for free". She was "13, 14" and having sex with men of "19, 20, 25, 26". In the film, the narration states: "It could be good, really something. I remember the first time someone asked me to grab their balls, I remember the power it gave me. But it wasn’t always like that; sometimes they’d just cum, and then they’d leave me there, wherever I was, half naked." In the final scenes, the artist performs at a local dance competition and people begin to clap. A gang of men, "most of whom [the artist] had sex with at one time or another" began to chant "slag, slag, slag".


title: Tracey Emin

text: In an interview with Melvyn Bragg, Emin commented on the incident: "I don’t see why I was such a slag. All I did was sleep with a few people. It’s not a crime, I didn’t kill anyone."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin has described "Top Spot" as being "about the moment of... understanding that you are walking into an adult world which means sex, which means often violence, which means that you may suddenly have some perspective on your own life that you never had before." "Top Spot" was given an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Classification, much to Emin's dismay, as she intended the film for a teenage audience.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin withdrew the film from general distribution in cinemas after it was rated with an 18 certificate. It was broadcast on BBC3 television in the UK in December 2004, and a DVD of the film was released in 2004.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin has created a number of installation art pieces including "Poor Thing (Sarah and Tracey)" (2001) which was made up of two hanging frames, hospital gowns, a water bottle and wire. A similar installation called "Feeling Pregnant III" (2005) made up of fabric hung off wooden and metal coat hangers and stands was a later creation for Emin. Both these installations touch further on Emin's relationship with pregnancy and abortion and can be related to Louise Bourgeois' sculptures such as "Untitled" (1996), a mobile of hanging clothes, and "Untitled" (2007), a series of standing bronze sculptures.


title: Tracey Emin

text: "The Perfect Place to Grow" (2001) was a video installation with a set consisting of a wooden birdhouse, a DVD (shot on Super 8), monitor, trestle, plants, wooden ladder. This installation has been exhibited at the Tate Britain in 2004 in their room dedicated to Emin's work and also White Cube in 2001. It was dedicated to her father, creating the bird house as "a tiny home for my dad" and Emin thought of the works' title from the idea of "nature and nurture".


title: Tracey Emin

text: "Knowing My Enemy" (2002) was a large-scale installation created by Emin for her Modern Art Oxford solo show of that year. Consisting of reclaimed wood and steel, Emin created a wooden "look-out" house upon a long, broken, wooden pier. "It's Not the Way I Want to Die" (2005) was another large-scale installation, part of Emin's 2005 solo show at White Cube. Emin created a large rollercoaster track with reclaimed timber and metal. Displayed in the same show was a smaller installation work called "Self Portrait" (2005) which consisted of a tin bath, bamboo, wire and neon light. Another related installation "Sleeping With You" (2005) consisted of painted reclaimed timber and a thin neon light across a dark wall.


title: Tracey Emin

text: An autobiographical short story covering Emin's conception through her life at age 13. Re-released in 2003, in an edition of 1000 by Counter Editions, though without the photographs and cloth bag.


title: Tracey Emin

text: A poster she photocopied and put up around her home when her cat Docket went missing became an object collected by people, but was excluded by Emin from her canon.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 2000, Emin was commissioned, as part of a scheme throughout London titled "Art in Sacred Spaces", to collaborate with children on an artwork at Ecclesbourne Primary School in Islington, north London. Pupils made the piece with her in Emin's style of sewing cut out letters onto a large piece of material. In 2004 the school enquired if Emin would sign the work so that the school could sell it as an original to raise funds. They planned to auction the piece for £35,000 for an arts unit, as it could not afford to display the large work. Emin and her gallery White Cube refused saying that it was not a piece of her art, therefore reducing its value, and requested it be returned. But Emin quickly came to an agreement with the school, where she paid £4,000 to create a perspex display box for the patchwork quilt to be showcased. Taking as her theme the title "Tell me something beautiful", Emin invited eight-year-olds to nominate their ideas of beauty and then to sew the keywords in felt letters on bright fabric squares. The resulting bold patchwork featured words such as "tree", "sunrise", "dolphin" and "nan".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Art critic John Slyce, who has worked on school collaborations with artists, supported Emin and White Cube's decision saying, "This is a horrific precedent for the school to try to set. They were lucky to have an artist of that stature spending that amount of time with them ... the artwork should remain in context with the kids. Children's primary experience of art should not be as a commodity."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Tracey Emin is one of just two women professors to be appointed at London's Royal Academy of Arts since the Academy was founded in 1768. In February 2013, she was named as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In response to the question "[D]oes society sufficiently value women artists?", Emin answered, "No. Of course not. But it's changing slowly. We probably just need another 200 years."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin does not overtly appear as a feminist artist, nor does she believe so herself. In an interview with Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Emin stated that she is a feminist, but not a feminist artist.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin discusses sexism from the viewpoint of the being a female victim. Though Emin's subversion of feminine stereotypes, Sophie Lloyd in her article describes her work as, "…[embodying] a change in perception of female sexuality that was in line with third-wave feminism, with women defining beauty and sexuality on their own terms." By narrating such harrowed and tortured memories, Emin uses vulnerability to tell not only her own struggles, but the struggles that many women may face while finding themselves.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin openly discusses her 1998 installation "My Bed" for audiences and interviewers alike. She has been as saying that, "By realizing how separate I was from it, I separated myself from the bed. I wasn't there any more." This notion of a female using the domestic space and then removing herself from the environment, thus confronting stereotypes and taboos in a confessional work was a controversial event. Feminists critics have described Emin as using the historical notion of the bedroom and its importance for female experiences, as a site for crude intervention.


title: Tracey Emin

text: John Molyneux explains in his article "Emin Matters", that her work revolves around class, sex and art itself. He writes that, "What she does do is present herself as culturally working class…She makes no attempt to engage in 'intellectual art speak' but sticks to unaffected everyday language," employing a strategy that doesn't place her in authority over her viewers or peers. However, her class background contradicts this tactic of equal understanding. Emin's mother until age seven owned a hotel in Margate, but bankruptcy and poverty ensued only when she broke up with Emin's father. While she may use street language, swear words, grammatical errors and misspellings to convey a primarily middle-class female experience, Emin now functions as a boss of her own art business and exists within the elite upper class. Her relationship with sex is a major theme and aspect of her work. Feminist writers have reviewed Emin's pieces as containing, "…no element of eroticism or titillation…unlike in Botticelli, Renoir or Klimt. Nor is it sexual fantasy or dreams, as we might find in surrealism, or the sex of the brothel featured so heavily in late 19th-century French art. It is real, everyday sex—as experienced by her, of course, but also by millions of other people".


title: Tracey Emin

text: While studying painting at the Royal College of Art Emin became disenchanted with the art of painting, "the idea of being a bourgeois artist, making paintings that just got hung in rich people's houses was a really redundant, old fashioned idea that made no sense for the times that we were living in." She felt there was no point in making art that someone had made decades or centuries before her, "I had to create something totally new or not at all". When asked by a reporter, when she decided that her life 'as Tracey Emin' was going to be her art, she replied '"I realised that I was much better than anything I'd ever made".


title: Tracey Emin

text: Roberta Smith of "The New Yorker" says the following about Tracey's work: "In her art she tells all, all the truths, both awful and wonderful, but mostly awful, about her life. Physical and psychic pain in the form of rejection, incest, rape, abortion and sex with strangers figure in this tale, as do love, passion and joy."


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 1998, Emin duetted with pop singer Boy George on a song called "Burning Up", released on an 18 track audio CD that accompanied the book "We love you".


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 2005, Emin compiled a CD of her favourite music called "Music To Cry To", which was released and sold by the UK household furnishings retailer and brand Habitat.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 2009, Emin designed the album artwork for a release by singer/songwriter Harper Simon, son of Paul Simon. The front cover depicts an aeroplane, drawn in Emin's scratchy monoprint style.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In spring 2020 Emin was diagnosed with squamous-cell bladder cancer. She underwent an operation to remove her bladder and several adjacent organs (radical cystectomy) that summer 2020, and this left her in remission, but with a stoma.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin is well known for her charity work; she has raised over a million pounds for children's charities such as the NSPCC and for HIV/AIDS charities including the Terrence Higgins Trust. She frequently donates original artworks for charity auctions, and has often adopted the role of auctioneer on the charity night to help increase the highest bid.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In June 2007, on returning from the Venice Biennale, Emin donated a piece of artwork, a handsewn blanket called "Star Trek Voyager" to be auctioned at Elton John's annual glamorous White Tie & Tiara Ball to raise money for The Elton John AIDS Foundation. The piece of artwork sold for £800,000. Also in June 2007, Emin's neon work "Keep Me Safe" reached the highest price ever (at that time) made for one of her neon works of over £60,000.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin has participated in "The Independent" newspaper's "Christmas Appeal" for many years, where she has offered for auction bespoke artworks and also drawing lessons with the artist. In December 2006, her lot raised £14,000 for a one-on-one drawing lesson, over champagne and cake, with the artist. The following year, in December 2007, her lot raised £25,150 for their appeal offering a special unique drawing of the highest bidder's pet embroidered onto a cushion in Emin's trademark style.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In January 2008, Emin went to Uganda where she had set up the brand new "Tracey Emin Library" at the rural Forest High School. She explained in her newspaper column, "Schools here don't have libraries. In fact, rural areas have very little. Most have no doctor, no clinic, no hospital; schools are few and far between. Education cannot afford to be a priority, but it should be... I think this library may be just the beginning."


title: Tracey Emin

text: On Valentine's Day 2008, Emin donated a red, heart-shaped neon artwork called "I Promise To Love You" (2007) for a charity auction to raise money for The Global Fund, which helps women and children affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa. The auction was called "(Auction) RED". The work sold for a record price $220,000, which was much higher than the guide estimates of between $60,000 and $80,000.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin has been a critic of Britain's income tax regime, stating "I'm simply not willing to pay tax at 50%", she is "very seriously considering leaving Britain", and suggests she will live in France. "The French have lower tax rates and they appreciate arts and culture." Emin has since denied that she intends to leave the country, stating that a journalist she spoke to previously exaggerated her comments, and that London is her home, and is the context in which she belongs.


title: Tracey Emin

text: "The Independent" newspaper reported in August 2010 that Emin is thought of as a supporter of the Conservative Party.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In an interview with "New Statesman" she revealed that she voted for the Conservatives at the 2010 General Election, adding, "We've got the best government at the moment that we've ever had." She has stated that she is an 'outsider' in the art world, as a result of voting Conservative. She is a Royalist.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In April 2014, Emin, who has a home and studio in Spitalfields, publicly called to save an East London newsagent who faced eviction from Old Spitalfields Market, after 22 years in business. She started a petition to save newsagent Ashok Patel's business, which was signed by 1,000 people.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In August 2014, Emin was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to "The Guardian" expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 2007, London's Royal Academy of Arts elected Tracey Emin as a Royal Academician and four years later, the Academy appointed Emin a Professor of Drawing. The University of Kent also awarded Emin an honorary doctorate in 2007.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to the arts. In February 2013, she was named one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by "Woman's Hour" on BBC Radio 4.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Emin's primary galleries are White Cube in London (since 1993), Lorcan O'neill in Rome and Xavier Hufkens in Brussels. In 2017, Emin and Lehmann Maupin ended their working relationship.


title: Tracey Emin

text: Charles Saatchi, who was best known as the most high-profile, high-spending collector of contemporary British art, bought "My Bed" (1998) for £150,000 ($248,000) from Lehmann Maupin's "Every Part of Me's Bleeding," the exhibition that won the artist a nomination for the 1999 Turner Prize. In 2013, on the occasion of a Christie's London sale that raised a total of 3.1 million pounds ($5 million) in aid of the Saatchi Gallery's policy of free entry, "To Meet My Past" (2002) sold for $778,900, establishing a new record for the artist. At another Christie's auction in 2014, "My Bed" was sold to White Cube founding director Jay Jopling for 2.5 million pounds, including buyer's commission, once again to benefit the Saatchi Gallery's foundation. It was estimated that the price of "My Bed" would sell between 800,000 and 1.2 million pounds. Before the sale, Emin said that "what I would really love is that someone did buy it and they donated it to the Tate."


title: Tracey Emin

text: Her most commonly auctioned sculptural works are phrases in her own handwriting set in neon, usually issued in editions of three, with two artist's proofs.


title: Tracey Emin

text: In 2011, British Prime Minister David Cameron added an artwork with 'more passion' in neon by Emin in his private apartment at 10 Downing Street. In January 2022, Emin requested that the artwork be removed in response to the Westminster lockdown parties controversy.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: Arthur and the Invisibles or Arthur and the Minimoys (French: Arthur et les Minimoys) is a 2006 English-language French fantasy adventure comedy animated/live-action film directed and co-written by French filmmaker Luc Besson. It is based on the first two books of the "Arthur" children's books series, "Arthur and the Minimoys" and "Arthur and the Forbidden City", by Besson.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: "Arthur and the Invisibles" was released theatrically in France on 29 November 2006 by EuropaCorp, followed by wide releases in a number of countries. It was re-released in France on 4 April 2007 with nineteen minutes of bonus footage. With a budget of €60 million, it was briefly the most expensive French film production, until it was surpassed by "Astérix at the Olympic Games" (2008).


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: It received positive reviews from critics in France but was received negatively in the United States, with criticism aimed at the animation and script, but praises for the voice performances and visual aspects. The film was also a box-office success in France but under-performed in the United States. The film's success in France spawned a media franchise with two sequels, "Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard" (2009) and "" (2010), and a spin-off, "Arthur, malédiction" (2022). It also spawned multiples video games, an animated television series and theme park attractions at Futuroscope and Europa-Park.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: It received the Imagina Award in the category Prix du Long-Métrage. Its soundtrack album was released on 9 January 2007.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: In 1960, protagonist 10-year-old Arthur lives with his grandmother Daisy in a quiet farm house on a dirt road, in a small rural community in Northeastern Connecticut (based on Sterling). His grandfather Archibald has recently gone missing and he sees little of his parents (who are away looking for work). Daisy entertains Arthur with stories of his grandfather's adventures in Africa, featuring the tall Bogo Matassalai and the minuscule Minimoys, of whom the latter now live in Archibald's garden, protecting a collection of rubies. Arthur becomes enamoured of a picture of Selenia, the princess of the Minimoys. When Daisy receives a two-day deadline to pay a large sum of money to a building developer named Ernest Davido, who plans to evict the two, Arthur looks for the rubies to pay off the debt and discovers various clues left by his grandfather. He is met in the garden by the Bogo Matassalai, who reduce Arthur to Minimoy size. From the Minimoys, Arthur learns that they are in danger from Maltazard, a Minimoy war hero who now rules the nearby 'Necropolis', after corruption by a weevil, by whom he has a son named Darkos.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: Arthur, reflecting his legendary British namesake, draws a sacred sword from its recess and uses it to protect the Minimoys from Maltazard's soldiers; whereupon Sifrat, the ruler of the Minimoys, sends Arthur to Necropolis, with the princess Selenia and her brother Betameche. "En route", they are attacked on two occasions by Maltazard's soldiers. In Necropolis, Selenia kisses Arthur, marking him as her husband and potential successor, and confronts Maltazard alone. When Maltazard learns that she has already kissed Arthur and thus can no longer give him her powers and cure his corruption, he imprisons all three, who discover a Minimoy form of Archibald. Thereafter Arthur and his grandfather escape and return to human form, with little time to spare before Maltazard's flood reaches the Minimoys. With the help of Mino, a royal advisor's long-lost son, Arthur redirects the flood to Necropolis; whereupon Maltazard abandons Necropolis and his son, and the water ejects the rubies above ground. Archibald pays Davido with one ruby; and when he tries to take them all, the Bogo Matassalai capture him and give him to the authorities (scene deleted in the U.S. edition). Arthur asks Selenia to wait for his return, and her agreement to do so while the film ends.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: The animation was produced by the French company BUF Compagnie, which hired approximately 100 animators, most of them from French animation schools and without any previous experience. Besson wanted a photorealistic environment, and BUF initially used microlenses to film physical environments, but eventually instead used photogrammetry, where a digitized photograph of a real object is manipulated with a computer. Sets were built to 1:3 scale, which allowed the animators to use natural elements, such as plants and grass. While the film did not use motion capture, real actors were used as reference, and recorded with 13 to 14 video cameras, but without the markers used in motion capture. Besson directed their performances. In terms of lip sync with actors' dialog, the French animators could not cope with the English phonemes. For Madonna and David Bowie, a camera was used to record their lips to help the animators. The animation was done with proprietary software.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: The film was budgeted at $86 million. In its first two weeks in cinemas in France "Arthur" earned over US$20 million.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: "Arthur and the Invisibles" received negative reviews from film critics. In the United States, the film has an approval rating of 22% via Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews from 92 critics, with an average rating of 4.4/10. The site's census reads, "Arthur wastes its big-name voice talent on a predictable script and substandard CG animation." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 39 out of 100, based on reviews from 22 critics.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: "Los Angeles Times" reviewer Alex Chun wrote, "Director Luc Besson admits he knew nothing about animation before he started this project, and it shows.” "Variety"'s Robert Koehler called it "alienating and dislikable,” and specifically noted that "…having African-American thesps Snoop Dogg and Anthony Anderson voice creatures that are basically humanoid monkeys shows poor taste."


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: Many found it derivative of sources ranging from King Arthur and the "Sword-in-the-Stone" to "The Dark Crystal" and "The Ant Bully" films. "It all simply looks as if [conceptual artist Patrice] Garcia and Besson couldn't decide on any one thing to copy," said Frank Lovece of "Film Journal International", "…so they copied them all." Lovece also noted that, “The whole thing gets seriously creepy when [the animated versions of] the grown-up, pinup-beauty princess and the 10-year-old boy fall for each other. Mary Kay Letourneau comes uncomfortably to mind." "Common Sense Media" disliked the film, giving it 2 stars out of 5 and saying, "Uneven animation-live action combo may bore kids." Josh Tyler of "Cinema Blend" greatly disliked the film, giving it 1.5 stars out of 5 and saying, "Sure it has sometimes-loved French director Luc Besson's name on it, but the character designs look like they were stolen from those wispy haired troll dolls that were popular for about five minutes fifteen years ago, and the plot sounded like it was written by a ten-year-old kid underneath a heavy bedspread, with a big chief tablet and a pencil the size of a horse's leg." Besson, in a May 2007 interview, blamed American distributor The Weinstein Company for the film's failure in the U.S., saying "…why the critics didn't like "Arthur" was because [Weinstein] changed so much of the film and tried to pretend the film was American. […] America and the UK were the only countries where the films were changed. The rest of the world has the same film as France."


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: On 1 February 2007, the film received the "Imagina" Award in the category "Prix du Long-Métrage". On 1 October 2007, Mylène Farmer was awarded the NRJ Ciné Award for her dubbing of Sélénia's voice in "Arthur and the Minimoys".


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: After a screening test in the United States, The Weinstein Company re-edited the film. Approximately nine minutes were cut. Most of the edits pertained to the love story between Arthur and Selenia (due to age differences). The Scenes were:


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: In addition to these deleted scenes, The Weinstein Company's version also adds in new narration by David Suchet replacing Ron Crawford's narration as Archibald, along with actors Jimmy Fallon, Emilio Estevez, Harvey Keitel, Rob Corddry, Nate Corddry, Erik Per Sullivan, Anthony Anderson and Jason Bateman replacing various actors from the original version. The entire storyline involving the parents and their greed for money was also deleted, reduced to a short scene and the narrator explaining that worrying over their son was all they needed to reform completely.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: The British version of the film, also distributed by the Weinstein Company, similarly lacked these scenes.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: The Minimoys featured in the first augmented reality Nestlé Chocopic cereal box with the help of Dassault Systemes technology 3DVIA Virtools.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: "Arthur and the Minimoys" was followed by a 2009 sequel, "Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard", based on the novel of the same name, and another sequel in 2010 titled "", based on the final book in the series. In the UK and Ireland, both sequels were combined into a single movie, "Arthur and the Great Adventure", released in December 2010.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: An animated TV series, "Arthur and the Minimoys", was produced by Studio 100, and debuted in 17 July 2018. A 20-episode web series was also being planned.


title: Arthur and the Invisibles

text: In April 2022, a horror spin-off, titled "Arthur, malédiction", was announced. Written by Besson and directed by Barthélemy Grossmann, the movie is not set in the same universe and follows a group of teenagers who are looking for the house where the original trilogy was filmed only to find that it is in reality haunted. It was release theatrically in France on 29 June 2022. However the film was poorly received by critics and fans of the franchise and is considered to be one of the worst films ever made.


title: Pinball

text: Pinball games are a family of games in which a ball is propelled into a specially designed table where it bounces off various obstacles, scoring points either en route or when it comes to rest. Historically the board was studded with nails called 'pins' and had hollows or pockets which scored points if the ball came to rest in them. Today, pinball is most commonly an arcade game in which the ball is fired into a specially designed cabinet known as a pinball machine, hitting various lights, bumpers, ramps, and other targets depending on its design. The game's object is generally to score as many points as possible by hitting these targets and making various shots with flippers before the ball is lost. Most pinball machines use one ball per turn (except during special multi-ball phases), and the game ends when the ball(s) from the last turn are lost. The biggest pinball machine manufacturers historically include Bally Manufacturing, Gottlieb, Williams Electronics and Stern Pinball.


title: Pinball

text: The origins of pinball are intertwined with the history of many other games. Games played outdoors by rolling balls or stones on a grass course, such as bocce or bowls, eventually evolved into various local ground billiards games played by hitting the balls with sticks and propelling them at targets, often around obstacles. Croquet, golf and pall-mall eventually derived from ground billiards variants.


title: Pinball

text: The evolution of outdoor games finally led to indoor versions that could be played on a table, such as billiards, or on the floor of a pub, like bowling and shuffleboard. The tabletop versions of these games became the ancestors of modern pinball.


title: Pinball

text: In France, during the long 1643–1715 reign of Louis XIV, billiard tables were narrowed, with wooden pins or skittles at one end of the table, and players would shoot balls with a stick or cue from the other end, in a game inspired as much by bowling as billiards. Pins took too long to reset when knocked down, so they were eventually fixed to the table, and holes in the table's bed became the targets. Players could ricochet balls off the pins to achieve the more challenging scorable holes. A standardized version of the game eventually became known as bagatelle.


title: Pinball

text: Somewhere between the 1750s and 1770s, the bagatelle variant ", or Japanese billiards in English, was invented in Western Europe, despite its name. Also called "Stosspudel", it used thin metal pins and replaced the cue at the player's end of the table with a coiled spring and a plunger. The player shot balls up the inclined playfield toward the scoring targets using this plunger, a device that remains in use in pinball to this day, and the game was also directly ancestral to pachinko.


title: Pinball

text: In 1869, British inventor Montague Redgrave settled in the United States and manufactured bagatelle tables in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1871 Redgrave was granted U.S. Patent #115,357 for his "Improvements in Bagatelle", another name for the spring launcher that was first introduced in "". The game also shrank in size to fit atop a bar or counter. The balls became marbles and the wickets became small metal pins. Redgrave's popularization of the spring launcher and innovations in game design are acknowledged as the birth of pinball in its modern form.


title: Pinball

text: By the 1930s, manufacturers were producing coin-operated versions of bagatelles, now known as "marble games" or "pin games". The table was under glass and used Montague Redgrave's plunger device to propel the ball into the upper playfield. In 1931 David Gottlieb's "Baffle Ball" became the first hit of the coin-operated era. Selling for $17.50, the game dispensed five to seven balls for a penny. The game resonated with people wanting cheap entertainment in the Great Depression-era economy. Most drugstores and taverns in the U.S. operated pinball machines, with many locations quickly recovering the cost of the game. Baffle Ball sold over 50,000 units and established Gottlieb as the first major manufacturer of pinball machines.


title: Pinball

text: In 1932, Gottlieb distributor Raymond Moloney found it hard to obtain more Baffle Ball units to sell. In his frustration he founded Lion Manufacturing to produce a game of his design, "Ballyhoo", named after a popular magazine. The game became a smash hit. Its larger playfield and ten pockets made it more challenging than "Baffle Ball", selling 50,000 units in 7 months. Moloney eventually changed the name of his company to Bally to reflect the success of this game. These early machines were relatively small, mechanically simple and designed to sit on a counter or bar top.


title: Pinball

text: The 1930s saw major advances in pinball design with the introduction of electrification. Pacific Amusements in Los Angeles, California produced "Contact" in 1933, which had an electrically powered solenoid to propel the ball out of a bonus hole in the middle of the playfield. Another solenoid rang a bell to reward the player. "Contac"t's designer, Harry Williams, eventually formed his own company, Williams Manufacturing, in 1944. Other manufacturers quickly followed suit with similar features. Electric lights soon became standard on all pinball games, to attract players.


title: Pinball

text: By the end of 1932, approximately 150 companies manufactured pinball machines, most of them in Chicago, Illinois. Chicago has been the center of pinball manufacturing ever since. Competition was strong, and by 1934, only 14 companies remained.


title: Pinball

text: During World War II, all major manufacturers of coin-operated games turned to manufacturing for the war effort. Some, like Williams, bought old games from operators and refurbished them, adding new artwork with a patriotic theme. At the end of the war, a generation of Americans looked for amusement in bars and malt shops, and pinball saw another golden age. Improvements such as the tilt-sensing mechanism and the awarding of free games (replays) appeared.


title: Pinball

text: Gottlieb's "Humpty Dumpty", introduced in 1947, was the first game to add player-controlled flippers to keep the ball in play longer. The low-power flippers required three pairs around the playfield to get the ball to the top.


title: Pinball

text: "Triple Action" was the first game to feature just two flippers at the bottom of the playfield. Unlike in modern machines, the flippers faced outwards. These flippers were made more powerful by the addition of a DC (direct current) power supply. These innovations were some of many by designer Steve Kordek.


title: Pinball

text: The first game to feature the familiar dual-inward-facing-flipper design was Gottlieb's "Just 21" released in January 1950. However, the flippers were rather far apart to allow for a turret ball shooter at the bottom center of the playfield. Another 1950 Gottlieb game, "Spot Bowler", was the first with inward-facing flippers placed close together.


title: Pinball

text: The post-war era was dominated by Gottlieb. Game designers Wayne Neyens and Ed Krynski, with artist Leroy Parker, produced games that collectors consider some of the best classic pinball machines.


title: Pinball

text: The introduction of microprocessors brought pinball into the realm of electronic gaming. The electromechanical relays and scoring reels that drove games in the 1950s and 1960s were replaced in the 1970s with circuit boards and digital displays. The first pinball machine using a microprocessor was Flicker, a prototype made by Bally in 1974. Bally soon followed that up with a solid-state version of Bow and Arrow in the same year with a microprocessor board that would be used in eight other machines until 1978, which included Eight Ball, the machine that held the sales record from 1977 to 1993. The first solid-state pinball is believed by some to be Mirco Games' "The Spirit of '76" (1976), though the first mainstream solid-state game was Williams' "Hot Tip" (1977). This new technology led to a boom for Williams and Bally, who attracted more players with games featuring more complex rules, digital sound effects, and speech.


title: Pinball

text: The video game boom of the 1980s signaled the end of the boom for pinball. Arcades replaced rows of pinball machines with video games like 1978's "Space Invaders", 1979's "Asteroids", 1980's "Pac-Man", and 1981's "Galaga". These earned significantly greater profits than the pinball machines of the day while simultaneously requiring less maintenance. Bally, Williams, and Gottlieb continued to make pinball machines while also manufacturing video games in much higher numbers. Many of the larger companies were acquired by, or merged with, other companies. Chicago Coin was purchased by the Stern family, who brought the company into the digital era as Stern Enterprises, which closed its doors in the mid-1980s. Bally exited the pinball business in 1988 and sold their assets to Williams, who subsequently used the Bally trademark from then on for about half of their pinball releases.


title: Pinball

text: While the video game craze of the late 1970s and early 1980s dealt a severe blow to pinball revenue, it sparked the industry's creative talents. All companies involved tried to take advantage of the new solid-state technology to improve player appeal of pinball and win back former players from video games. Some of this creativity resulted in landmark designs and features still present today. Some of these include speech, such as Williams' "Gorgar"; ramps for the ball to travel around, such as Williams' "Space Shuttle"; "multiball", used on Williams' "Firepower"; multi-level games like Gottlieb's "Black Hole" and Williams' "Black Knight"; and blinking chase lights, as used on Bally's "Xenon". Although these novel features did not win back players as the manufacturers had hoped, they changed players' perception of pinball for decades.


title: Pinball

text: During the 1980s, pinball manufacturers navigated technology changes while going through changes of ownership and mergers: Gottlieb was sold to Premier Technologies, and Bally merged with Williams. The Video game crash of 1983 made the manufacturers refocus on their pinball sales. A trend started of pinball becoming increasingly elaborate to use more computing resources, following video games. Games in the latter half of the decade such as High Speed started incorporating full soundtracks, elaborate light shows and backbox animations - a radical change from the previous decade's electromechanical games. Although pinball continued to compete with video games in arcades, pinball held a premium niche, since the video games of the time could not reproduce an accurate pinball experience.


title: Pinball

text: By the first years of the 1990s, pinball had made a strong comeback and saw new sales highs. Some new manufacturers entered the field, such as Capcom Pinball and Alvin G. and Company, founded by Alvin Gottlieb, son of David Gottlieb. Gary Stern, the son of Williams co-founder Sam Stern, founded Data East Pinball with funding from Data East Japan.


title: Pinball

text: The games from Williams now dominated the industry, with complicated mechanical devices and more elaborate display and sound systems attracting new players to the game. Licensing popular movies and icons of the day became a staple for pinball, with Bally/Williams' "The Addams Family" from 1992 hitting a modern sales record of 20,270 machines. Two years later, Williams commemorated this benchmark with a limited edition of 1,000 "Addams Family Gold" pinball machines, featuring gold-colored trim and updated software with new game features. Other notable popular licenses included "" and "". Expanding markets in Europe and Asia helped fuel the revival of interest. Pat Lawlor was a designer, working for Williams until their exit from the industry in 1999. About a year later, Lawlor returned to the industry, starting his own company, working in conjunction with Stern Pinball to produce new games.


title: Pinball

text: The end of the 1990s saw another downturn in the industry, with Gottlieb, Capcom, and Alvin G. closing by the end of 1996. Data East's pinball division was acquired by Sega and became Sega Pinball in 1994. By 1997, there were two companies left: Sega Pinball and Williams. In 1999, Sega sold their pinball division to Gary Stern (President of Sega Pinball at the time) who called his company Stern Pinball. By this time, Williams games rarely sold more than 4,000 units. In 1999, Williams attempted to revive sales with the Pinball 2000 line of games, merging a video display into the pinball playfield. The reception was initially good with "Revenge from Mars" selling well over 6,000 machines, but short of the 10,000-plus production runs for releases just six years earlier. The next Pinball 2000 game, "Star Wars Episode I", sold only a little over 3,500 machines. Williams exited the pinball business to focus on making gaming equipment for casinos, which was more profitable. They licensed the rights to reproduce Bally/Williams parts to Illinois Pinball and reproduce full-sized machines to The Pinball Factory. Stern Pinball remained the only manufacturer of original pinball machines until 2013, when Jersey Jack Pinball started shipping "The Wizard of Oz". Most members of the design teams for Stern Pinball are former employees of Williams.


title: Pinball

text: Amid the 1990s closures, virtual pinball simulations, marketed on computers and home consoles, had become high enough in quality for serious players to take notice: these video versions of pinball such as Epic Pinball, Full Tilt! Pinball and the Pro Pinball series found marketplace success and lasting fan interest, starting a new trend for realistic pinball simulation. This market existed largely independently from the physical pinball manufacturers, and relied upon original designs instead of licenses until the 2000s.


title: Pinball

text: After most pinball manufacturers' closure in the 1990s, smaller independent manufacturers started appearing in the early 2000s.


title: Pinball

text: In November 2005, The Pinball Factory (TPF) in Melbourne, Australia, announced that they would be producing a new "Crocodile Hunter"-themed pinball machine under the Bally label. With the death of Steve Irwin, it was announced that the future of this game was uncertain. In 2006, TPF announced that they would be reproducing two popular 1990s era Williams machines, "Medieval Madness" and "Cactus Canyon". TPF, however, was unable to make good on its promises to produce new machines, and in October 2010 transferred its Williams Electronics Games licenses as well as its pinball spare parts manufacturing and distribution business to Planetary Pinball Supply Inc, a California distributor of pinball replacement parts.


title: Pinball

text: In 2006, Illinois pinball company PinBall Manufacturing Inc. produced 178 reproductions of Capcom's "Big Bang Bar" for the European and US markets.


title: Pinball

text: In 2010, MarsaPlay in Spain manufactured a remake of Inder's original "Canasta" titled "New Canasta", which was the first game to include a liquid-crystal display (LCD) screen in the backbox.


title: Pinball

text: In 2013, Jersey Jack Pinball released "The Wizard of Oz" pinball machine, based on the 1939 film. It is the first pinball machine manufactured in the US with a large color display (LCD) in the backbox, the first widebody pinball machine since 1994 and the first new US pinball machine not made by Stern Pinball since 2001. This game was followed by "The Hobbit" in 2016 (based on "The Hobbit" film series), "Dialed In!" in 2017 (an original theme designed by Pat Lawlor which included bluetooth technology that enabled flipper control from a smart phone and a camera built into the backbox for taking selfies), "Pirates of the Caribbean" (based on the Pirates of the Caribbean film series) in 2018 and "Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory" (based on the movie "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" from 1971) in 2019.


title: Pinball

text: In 2013, the Chicago Gaming Company announced the creation of a remake of "Medieval Madness". This was later followed by a 2017 release of a remake of "Attack from Mars", and a 2018 release of a remake of "Monster Bash".


title: Pinball

text: In 2014, the new pinball manufacturer Spooky Pinball released their first game "America's Most Haunted". This was followed by a few more themed, original, and contracted titles.


title: Pinball

text: In 2015, the new British pinball manufacturer Heighway Pinball released the racing themed pinball machine "Full Throttle". The game has an LCD screen for scores, info, and animations located in the playfield surface at player's eye view. The game was designed with modularity in mind so that the playfield and artwork could be swapped out for future game titles. Heighway Pinball's second title, "Alien", was released in 2017 and was based on the "Alien" and "Aliens" films. Due to internal company issues, Heighway Pinball ceased manufacturing operations and closed its doors in April 2018.


title: Pinball

text: In 2016, Dutch Pinball, based in the Netherlands, released their first game "The Big Lebowski", based on the 1998 film, "The Big Lebowski".


title: Pinball

text: In 2017, Multimorphic began shipping its pinball machine platform after several years of development. It is a modular design where different games can be swapped into the cabinet. It also has a large interactive display as the playfield surface, which differs from all prior pinball machines traditionally made of plywood and embedded with translucent plastic inserts for lighting.


title: Pinball

text: Pinball machines, like many other mechanical games, were sometimes used as gambling devices. Some pinball machines, such as Bally's "bingos", featured a grid on the backglass scoring area with spaces corresponding to targets or holes on the playfield. Free games could be won if the player could get the balls to land in a winning pattern; however, doing this was nearly random, and a common use for such machines was for gambling. Other machines allowed players to win and accumulate large numbers of "free games" which could then be cashed out for money with the location owner. Later, this type of feature was discontinued to legitimize the machines, and to avoid legal problems in areas where awarding free games was considered illegal, some games, called Add-A-Ball, did away with the free game feature, instead giving players extra balls to play (between 5 and 25 in most cases). These extra balls were indicated via lighted graphics in the backglass or by a ball count wheel, but in some areas that was disallowed, and some games were shipped with a sticker to cover the counters.


title: Pinball

text: Pinball was banned beginning in the early 1940s until 1976 in New York City. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was responsible for the ban, believing that it robbed school children of their hard-earned nickels and dimes. La Guardia spearheaded major raids throughout the city, collecting thousands of machines. The mayor participated with police in destroying machines with sledgehammers before dumping the remnants into the city's rivers.


title: Pinball

text: The ban ended when Roger Sharpe (a star witness for the AMOA – Amusement and Music Operators Association) testified in April 1976 before a committee in a Manhattan courtroom that pinball games had become games of skill and were not games of chance (which are more closely associated with gambling). He began to play one of two games set up in the courtroom, and – in a move he compares to Babe Ruth's home run in the 1932 World Series – called out precisely what he was going to shoot for, and then proceeded to do so. Astonished committee members reportedly voted to remove the ban, which was followed in other cities. (Sharpe reportedly acknowledges, in a self-deprecating manner, his courtroom shot was by sheer luck although there was admittedly skill involved in what he did.)


title: Pinball

text: Like New York, Los Angeles banned pinball machines in 1939. The ban was overturned by the Supreme Court of California in 1974 because (1) if pinball machines were games of chance, the ordinance was preempted by state law governing games of chance in general, and (2) if they were games of skill, the ordinance was unconstitutional as a denial of the equal protection of the laws. Although it was rarely enforced, Chicago's ban on pinball lasted three decades and ended in 1976. Philadelphia and Salt Lake City also had similar bans. Regardless of these events, some towns in America still have such bans on their books; the town of Kokomo, Indiana lifted its ordinance banning pinball in December 2016.


title: Pinball

text: Another close relative of pinball is pachinko, a gambling game played in Japan. Although they share a common ancestry, the games are very different. Pachinko involves shooting many small balls repeatedly into a nearly vertical playfield, while pinball is about manipulating the small number of balls currently in play on a near-horizontal playfield.


title: Pinball

text: The cabinet of a pinball machine is the (traditionally wooden) frame usually shaped like a box, with the playfield laid inside.


title: Pinball

text: One identifiable attribute of the pinball machine is the cabinet design that contains the mechanical, electrical and electronic parts, assemblies and wires. The modern cabinet consists of two major items. The 'backbox' or 'head' (among other terms: lightbox) is the vertical box atop the lower cabinet opposite the player's position. It usually consists of a wooden box with colorful graphics on the side and a large 'backglass' in the front. The backglass usually has very stylized graphics related to or depicting the theme of the game, and also the game's name (and sometimes the manufacture year). The backglass is the game's 'advertisement', intended to catch the eye of passersby and entice gameplay. Many backglasses are beautifully illustrated and approach fine illustration or fine art quality. The silkscreened graphics are partially translucent and have small lights mounted in strategic locations to highlight parts of the artwork and light up scores, the ball currently in play, which player's turn it is (on a multi-player game), and so on. The Electro-Mechanical (EM) heads often have 'animation' or moving parts incorporated into the backglass and spring to life if the player achieves the required sequence on the playfield to activate it. Most games have an "insert board" between the backglass and controls that have lights to highlight portions of the backglass artwork or game name or other mechanical devices or displays.