Emin is right – richer people should foot bill for museums

For a woman once considered one of the most chaotic in the art world, Tracey Emin doesn't half talk sense.

- NANCY DURRANT

As her major retrospective exhibition opened at Tate Modern this week, she called on Britain's wealthy - people “like me”, as she put it - to support the continuation of free entry to the country’s national collections by regularly donating to or buying memberships for each one they visited.

Erm, yes. Good thought. There is no reasonable argument that very wealthy people shouldn't be routinely philanthropic - unless you're a fundamentally terrible person, in which case I imagine you're all for it - but the importance of maintaining this particular, remarkable policy, which will be 25 years old in December (hat tip to New Labour), cannot be overstated.

As a working-class kid in a struggling seaside town who left school at 13, Emin said, she had to find her own way into art, and was “really lucky that [Tate] was free”. Would that kid really now, at the age of 62, be a Dame, staging a major show at Tate Modern, had it not been for that precious opportunity to just walk in off the street and look at stuff?