The stains, the shame, the sorrow – Emin’s bed speaks direct to gen Z

I found myself this week pressed up against a scrum of young people photographing Tracey Emin’s My Bed at Tate Modern in London as if it were a celebrity.

Last year, during Emin’s first solo show in the US, I had joined young American students queuing for an hour around a corner to see her speak. Everyone adored her. For months afterwards, you couldn’t walk a mile without spotting a tote bag emblazoned with her cheeky neon scrawl.

At the Tate I finally realised why: her total, unselfconscious excavation of her own life – the stains, shame, sex and sorrow – feels entirely of my generation, even though Emin is now in her 60s. It speaks to that queasy discomfort around self-exposure that those who’ve grown up online don’t seem to possess.

I’d just finished a new book on Yoko Ono by Paul Morley, full of similarly mad, playful, naked acts of art. Ono’s retrospective at Tate Modern felt, at the time, like a great feminist correction: a reassertion of the woman as instigator, not appendage. Emin’s feels like more than that – a kind of homecoming.

Now I’ve started reading Exhibition by Alex Hyde, a fictionalised account of Emin’s relationship with Sarah Lucas – all cigarettes, bedsits and bravado. Might we finally be getting the great feminist art reckoning?

Walking home, my friend and I stumbled upon a surprising announcement: Greggs, the archetypal British sausage-roll shop, has started selling iced matcha lattes. We went in after we were cutely promised we could “Meet your matcha”. To advertise its new venture, Greggs recently opened its own pop-up pilates studio in central London offering classes accompanied by matcha and its signature sausage rolls. The perfect combination.

“Matchaification,” we coined it – every single coffee shop is bowing to the power of TikTok. No one can just sell coffee anymore. It’s all iced brown sugar this, vanilla oat matcha that. It’s sad, capitalist greed, that we’re pricing people out of a nice, cheap cup of coffee, we said scornfully as we sipped our iced strawberry oat matcha lattes all the way home.

You know where people who like to drink matcha and do pilates congregate? Saunas. You can’t turn a corner without seeing a new sauna opening in London.

There’s posh Russian ones where you can drink cold shots of vodka while being beaten with birch sticks, or scarily efficient medical ones for finance bros in the City on their lunch breaks. In Kentish Town there’s even a new one in a car park.

Research has shown that our lucky Scandi neighbours are so happy because they go to saunas literally all the time. People bring their newborn babies there and even the Finnish national parliament building has its own sauna. Apparently they get through the bleak winter happier than us because they spend a lot of time in low light – the golden glow of candle light and fireplaces, which makes everyone look more attractive to one another. So saunas kill two birds with one stone, I guess.

I finished my week at Hackney Wick community sauna, where everything is wood-fired and fresh-brewed cinnamon tea and, if you’re lucky, a madman will occasionally throw a towel around the air to the beat of very loud Argentinian rock music to waft steam on you. Heaven.

Photograph by Yui Mok/PA Wire