Glasgow Council is proposing a charge to visit the city chambers. They should go much further, says Mark Smith

All good artists, writers, musicians, you name it, are the same: you’ve got to put in a bit of effort to understand them and to love them and that’s certainly true of Tracey Emin. A retrospective of her work has just opened at the Tate Modern and the review in The Times said of the show that Emin “has a way with words, often mangled to great effect”, which I thought was very good and spot on. You’re never quite sure what Tracey’s saying but you get the feeling that it’s, possibly, quite important.

So it is with her remarks this week on galleries and museums. Speaking at the opening of the Tate show, Emin said the British Museum, of which she is a patron, had a “terrible colonial past” and needed to move “fast” into the 21st century but that “you can’t just give things back” because “you don’t know that it is going to be looked after”. Emin didn’t explain what moving fast into the 21st century means or what she means by terrible, but she did appear to be urging caution over the return of “stolen” items, which is good news. The trendy view is ‘give it all back’, so good on Tracey for resisting trendy, if that is what she was doing.

Her views on museum funding are a little more mangled. We know what we’re dealing with don’t we: the Tate has got a deficit, the National Gallery has got a deficit, everybody’s got a deficit, so the conversation is starting to turn towards whether entry to museums and galleries should still be free. The policy dates from the days when Oasis were number one and there was money to spend; 25 years on, Oasis are doing gigs again but the country, and many of its institutions,........

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