It looks like Tracey Emin's glasses are broken again. "Some of my favourite drawings I have done with my eyes closed - or so drunk I do not remember making them." Do we really need to know that? I was stone cold sober when I visited the show and saw nothing memorable. Usually when I visit an art gallery I take out my notebook, sketch something, even take a photograph. But I left the gallery quite unmoved. Most of these words had been prepared in anticipation, recycling reactions to other arrangements from the 'narrative' on art."I am the custodian, . . . of the images that live in my mind." And what a mess that must be. "Everything has come through me." Like a torrent of self abuse. Most of us flush before we leave the toilet, it looks like Ms Emin still uses her stolen Painting School letterheads for toilet paper. "I'd spend hours wandering around the National Gallery, . . . closing my eyes and imagining my paintings hanging there..." Picasso had the audacity to take his canvases to the Louvre just to see how they looked next to Old Masters. I can't bring myself to put Picasso and Emin in the same. Sentence. Everything has to be separated by periods. He treated his wives much like she seems to have treated her children. Nothing worth the paper it's scribbled on, Tracey would be better off tracing from the Old Masters. Which ones? None in particular. This is just another termination. As the Americans say, Period. I say Fool, Stop. The sewing machine used to 'embroider' some works left its mark like a broken spider's web as it staggered across the cloth, it's a mechanical process, a mechanical rhythm, a vibration. I guess that's the only vibrations she experiences. This is another abortion of a show. And that book needs cutting down to size instead of the forest of trees being cut down to make them. The publishers will end up recycling them providing mulch for the next forest of artists' catalogues. You can skip this show in two ways, don't visit, and get the skip to take it away to Edmonton. I would rather have a thousand drawings by Bobby Baker like the show at the Wellcome Collection.

"The Examiner" The poor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober character by caricature representation, and the whole 'blotted and blurred' and very badly drawn. These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain.

The quotation of the criticism above from The Examiner relates to William Blake's own exhibition, presently reassembled at Tate Britain. There is an uncanny relevance to Travey Emin's latest exhibition and her book. The Emperor and Tracey Emin have no clothes.

Art exhibition under deconstruction by  Pick-Axe-O