I would really love to hate Tracey Emin. Haven’t we heard too much about the abuse and abortions, the bullying boyfriends and self-abasing depressions? Haven’t we picked our way too often through the detritus of her despair? I have grown sick of the whining of this now successful woman who sits at the centre of our culture parading her wounded psyche like some contemporary martyr; displaying her vagina as St James displays a cockle shell.

Emin has become too eminent. Having represented Britain at the Venice Biennale last year, she presided over the Royal Academy this summer and now, today, her first major retrospective opens at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Tracey Emin: 20 Years feels about as fresh as a Friends repeat. And yet this show grabbed my attention and kept me lingering.

It is not that there is anything unexpected. Emin has not made any new work. Rather, this exhibition offers a chance for reassessment as well as for latecomers to catch up.

Taking up the ground floor of the gallery, it leads you more or less chronologically past all the most famous stuff: the dyslexic diaries, the brightly appliquéd blankets, the neon expletives, the confessional videos. It re-creates landmark career moments along the way from her mocking “major retrospective” (a photo display of all the works she smashed up as a student, consigned to the skip in despair) through the Turner Prize installation that included her unmade bed, to a Stockholm performance in which she painted naked in a studio while onlookers spied through a peephole. (Sadly, her tent stitched with the names of all the people she had ever slept with was lost in a fire.)

From its first “meet the Emin family” moment, this show launches you into a life as dangerous and fragile and rickety as the shoddily home-made helter skelter that stands in one gallery. It’s almost impossible not to be caught up by the mad swoop.

Mad Tracey from Margate has become a caricature. But you can’t help but be struck by her courage. And there are moments along the way that snag at the heart: the crushed Benson & Hedges packet that her favourite uncle was clutching in his fatal car crash, the scratchy little drawings as evocative as pictures by some victim of child abuse, the sudden vividness of a scribbled description, the moments of lyricism that still speak of an innocent’s dream.

Emin is the Jade Goody of the gallery-goer’s world. Her work may be littered with artistic references — Eduard Munch, Egon Schiele and Louise Bourgeois all spring to mind — but the real impetus behind it is our modern confessional culture. She is the sort of monster that our Big Brother world has made. She mixes all the ingredients — the cult of personality, the unabashed self- promotion, the blatant commerce — to make something that shows us with a mixture of repulsive brashness and unbearable poignancy how sad and superficial and self-serving it all is.

Emin is a substantial artist in so far as she holds up a mirror to her culture. If you hate her for that, then she’s probably doing something right.

Box office: 0131-624 6200, until November 9

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