The trouble with Tracey Emin is “Tracey Emin”. More than any artist in recent memory, Emin is a fully-fledged celebrity, her life, and her work, firmly lodged in the public ima­gin­a­tion as a crude cartoon drawn by tabloid headline-writers.

This is not the same fame as that of those artists who have defined a public persona and woven it into their practice, such as Dali or Warhol. Nor is Emin’s fame a match for those artists whose private lives have ended up public property, such as Picasso with his prom­is­cu­ity or Pollock and his boozing. No, Tracey Emin is different, because almost all of her work is about Tracey Emin. She has invited us, with a candour that is often alarming, to consider her life as she has lived it.

Now, though, Emin is inviting us to consider the work itself. The subtitle to her first major ret­ro­spect­ive, 20 Years, has a proud feel to it. There’s a nod to Emin’s debut - titled My Major Ret­ro­spect­ive and re­pro­duced here, it consisted of tiny pho­to­graph­ic re­pro­duc­tions of destroyed early pieces - and a strong hint that Emin is now out to show that she’s proven herself more than a flash in the Brit Art pan. Has she? Yes and no.

Any artist, when gathering two decades’ worth of work, will be forced to include a few dead-ends along with pieces that still resonate, but there’s an awful lot of weak stuff here.

Most of this lesser work is what you might call un­fil­ter­ed: the straight­for­ward con­fes­sion­al pieces are not a life tran­s­formed into art so much as a life lived and presented for ex­am­in­a­tion. Wall-mounted vitrines collect auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al ephemera alongside framed texts that explain their sig­n­i­fic­ance.

May Dodge, My Nan gathers family snaps and a little collage made from a doily, Uncle Colin contains a cigarette packet salvaged from the car crash that killed Emin’s uncle, along with a newspaper report of the tragedy. These are moving, sure, and the spiky poetry of Emin’s writing is at times a joy to read. But they are ul­ti­m­ately slight, affecting in the moment but soon forgotten.

The same can’t be said of the su­per­fi­ci­ally similar video works here. In Why I Never Became A Dancer, Emin narrates the tale of a gang of lads sur­roun­d­ing her at a disco com­pet­i­tion to chant the word “slag”, then appears on screen, with a tri­um­phant grin on her face, boogying to Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). CV relates the artist’s history year by year, again with the emphasis on triumph over adversity, as the camera pans around a dingy flat, even­tu­ally alighting on Emin, naked on the floor in a foetal huddle. The Perfect Place To Grow, a ram­shack­le hut sur­roun­ded by plants, contains a brief film of Emin’s father present­ing her with a flower - a man­i­fest­a­tion of his ideal home. These works share a sense of tran­s­form­a­tion, a moulding of auto­bi­o­graph­ic­al material into something generous, inviting empathy, unlike the flatly presented re­v­el­a­tions in those texts and vitrines.

This is also true of My Bed. This piece has come to define Emin’s work, even sup­plant­ing Carl Andre’s “pile of bricks” as emblem of the supposed con game of con­tem­por­ary art. It stands up rather well. Now that the con­tro­ver­sy sur­roun­d­ing this grubby mattress sur­roun­ded by manky tissues, crushed fag packets and stained knickers has faded, it begins to look like something more than a monument to Emin’s bed-bound de­pres­sion, sub­ver­t­ing the coolly presented Duch­am­pi­an readymade to form an object that hasn’t been found, but lived.

The blankets, which - after that bed, and the tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, which was destroyed in the Momart fire - are Emin’s best known works, reveal another subtle en­gage­ment with art history. Gathered here in the staid spaces of the National Gallery of Modern Art, these appliqued works take on a mo­nu­ment­al air, adding another layer to Emin’s use of craft materials which don’t belong in the world of fine art, her adoption of the higgledy-piggledy aesthetic of “outsider” art, and the col­l­ab­or­at­ive act of sewing them together with friends, sticking two fingers up at the idea of the artist as lone hero. Telling stories in slogans and clipped phrases, the best of them are in­cred­ibly dense. Automatic Orgasm (Come Unto Me) casts Emin as a latter-day St Teresa, ex­per­i­en­cing a sort of secular, blas­phe­m­ous ecstasy. Hotel In­ter­n­a­tion­al, the first blanket, offers what feels like a complete family history of Emin and her clan, marrying specific anecdotes to simple lists of names and dates.

There’s much more to see, too. Too much. There are so many scritchy, hurried mono­prints that they begin to lose their impact, a shame, since the Abortion: How It Feels series is perhaps the strongest, most affecting of Emin’s re­v­el­at­ory works, and the Bird Drawings provide a sur­pris­ing, funny coun­ter­point to the re­lent­less con­fes­sions that surround them. It is as if, in a bid to de­mon­strate the real depth and breadth of her practice, Emin has opted for quantity over quality. The result is a feeling that there’s a very good show trapped inside this too-complete out­pour­ing of work.

That said, this is a valuable ex­hib­i­tion. It reveals Emin to be oddly prescient, pre­fig­ur­ing the defining trope of 21st-century pop culture, that pact made between a public with an ap­par­ently in­ex­haust­ible appetite for voyeurism, and ex­hib­i­tion­ists happy to expose them­selves. But is Emin a creature of her time, or will a future ret­ro­spect­ive - 40 Years, say - draw such a big crowd, and so much attention?

I reckon so, as long as the wheat is sorted from the chaff: Emin’s blankets, her video works, and even her bed look set to stand the test of time.

Tracey Emin: 20 Years is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art until November 9th.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 8th August , 2008.