Tracey Emin's Unmade Bed Was Shortlisted for the Turner Prize and Sold for £2.5 Million

Tracey Emin's My Bed is exactly what its title says: the bed she had been lying in for four days during a depressive episode in 1998 — sheets stained, a pile of vodka bottles and cigarette ends and slippers and used condoms on the floor next to it — lifted intact into a gallery and presented as a sculpture. Tate Britain shortlisted it for the 1999 Turner Prize. Emin lost to Steve McQueen, but the work became the year's tabloid story. Critics objected that anyone could exhibit an unmade bed. Emin's reply was that anyone hadn't.

The piece had a louder afterlife than the prize might suggest. In 2000, Charles Saatchi bought it for around £150,000. The performance artists Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi staged a protest piece in which they stripped to their underwear and jumped on the bed in the gallery for several minutes; the bouncers eventually retrieved them. Private Eye's Craig Brown parodied it as My Turd. The bed traveled to museums in New York, Tokyo, and Edinburgh.

In July 2014 Christie's auctioned the work in London. The presale estimate was £800,000 to £1.2 million. It hammered at £2,546,500. The buyer was the German art dealer Christian Ofili-Ost on behalf of an unnamed collector; the bed was eventually loaned to the Tate, where it has hung in a vitrine alongside two early Francis Bacon canvases that Emin chose herself. Emin has since said the work was, for her, less an installation than the closest a sculptor can get to a self-portrait — a record of a particular bad month.