‘Fear not/To unfold your dark visions of torment’: Blake and Emin’s Bad Sex Aesthetic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
David Bowie describes Tracey Emin as ‘William Blake as a woman, written by Mike Leigh’ (1997, 24). What connection between them would prompt this catchy sound bite? A certain emotional nakedness, it would seem; a compul- sion to bare secrets and lies. Plus, a transgender aptitude: Emin is able to be Blake as a woman; Blake is able to be a woman in Emin; and Leigh’s films are able to portray raw female emotional experience. Bowie goes on to empha- size, at once, ‘the dawning of late eighteenth-century self-consciousness, that first realisation of self you find in early nineteenth-century portraits’ and ‘the deeply dysfunctional work found at Gugging Hospital in Vienna, the bastion of working“Outside” artists’ (ibid., 24). The link to ‘“Outside” artists’ may have to do with craziness, but also technical skill. Can Blake or Emin draw properly? Or spell properly either? And Leigh, strictly speaking, doesn’t exactly write his films; he’s famous for having his actors improvise, a much looser way to compose. Bowie’s characterization, then, links emo- tional excess and technical sloppiness. Yet the juxtaposition with portraiture suggests a strange combination of naivety with high and deliberate skill. These people make messy art; but successful messy art which ‘realizes’ the modern self.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".