Tracey Emin’s Bed Sold for a Small Eyebrow-Raising Fortune at Auction

One of modern art's most argued-about works has been sold. Tracey Emin's famously debated 1999 work My Bed went under the hammer for the very first time, complete with dirty sheets, cigarette butts and condoms — and taking away a cheeky £2.2 million.

Emin, who showed up to the auction yesterday, gained notoriety when her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 debuted at a 1997 Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition at London's Royal Academy. After getting drunk, going on national TV and getting all sweary, she'd release My Bed two years later to colossal debate.

One of modern art's classic "Is this art? What is art? Is this bag of wrenches art?" generators, My Bed was expected to sell between £800,000 and £1.2 million (roughly $1.4 million to $2.2 million) at auction — instead raising the bar to £2.2 million. With the buyer's premium, My Bed really went for £2,546,500; a world record for Emin at auction. Francis Bacon's Study For Head Of Lucian Freud was also put under the hammer, fetching a quiet little price of £10.2 million.

The highly-scrutinised installation is a recreation of Emin's actual bed during a rough time — the artist spent days in the bed during relationship difficulties and dealt with suicidal thoughts. Scattered with paraphenalia from the artist's own bedroom (condoms, menstrual-stained underwear, slippers), My Bed caused controversy not for the collective sum of confrontingly personal items but for the stains on the sheets. Gallery-goers saw the traces of bodily secretion as a little too human. "It's a self-portrait, but not one that people would like to see," Emin said.

"I took everything out of my bedroom and made it into an installation," Emin said. "And when I put it into a white space, for some people it became quite shocking. But I just thought it looked like a damsel in distress, like a woman fainting or something, needing to be helped."

The new owners (who haven't been revealed yet) might be able to recreate the work of two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, who jumped on Emin's bed in a performance creatively titled Two Naked Men Jump into Tracey's Bed. Most interestingly will be the conditions under which the new owner must actually display My Bed.

Previously (when not displayed in a gallery setting) the work has been on display at the home of its owner Charles Saatchi. As The Guardian reports, the work — a flurry of seemingly random miscellany — has very meticulous installation instructions.

"It's a very complicated piece to put together," Director of Cadogan Tate Fine Art Stephen Glynn says. "It comes with a dossier of photographs of every object, and a list of where exactly everything needs to go." A bit like an Ikea instruction manual, then? "A bit. You're certainly trying to make sure that everything goes in the right place."

Displayed at the Tate Modern in 1999, My Bed was shortlisted for the Turner Prize that year. Saatchi can now count its sweet, sweet Emin pennies, with proceeds going straight back to the Saatchi Gallery — the team are moving to make the gallery have free admission.

Via BBC, Reuters and The Guardian.