Absolutely everyone has heard of Tracey Emin. In an age when, I’m told, everyone wants to be a celebrity, famous for at least 15 minutes, her renown alone is a huge achievement. So is her capacity to shock. At a time when most artists long to cause distress, in the teeth of public indifference to everything they serve up, however unspeakable, Emin is able to confront us with, among other outrages, her unmade bed. Included in her current Edinburgh exhibition, it can still shock some.

She repeatedly assaults us with words and images from which, if shown anywhere but in an art gallery, the most liberal members of the local Neighbourhood Watch committee would feel obliged to protect us. Parts of Emin’s autobiographical ramblings would surely count as pornography if read in the backroom of a dirty bookshop rather than framed and hung on the walls of a distinguished national gallery. (Listen, for example, to the commentary to the film called Why I Never Became a Dancer.) And some of the titles alone must be startling not only to me. As this is a family newspaper, I won’t write them out, but Emin makes free use of the c-word, glowing brightly in neon.

What distresses me far more than Emin’s taste for the obscene, however, is her amazing, unshakable faith in her own importance. In an interview published recently, she expressed the hope that the show will make people realise “that I am a great artist, whether they like my work or not”.

She knows, on the other hand, that many people claim, at least, to admire her work. The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is clearly thrilled to be staging this, the first-ever retrospective of her work. It has, its curators believe, pulled off a coup, and they are looking forward to record-breaking numbers of visitors and catalogue sales to rival those of the collected verse of William McGonagall.

I must admit right away, however, that, while I find her work almost entirely trivial, some of those whose views I value and respect think her installations, photographs, texts and drawings meaningful, even moving. They are engaged by the accounts of her life and by the mementoes of the abortions and other crises.

Parts of this exhibition do look good, it’s true. For example, there’s a touchingly ramshackle rollercoaster, inspired by memories of the one at Dreamland, in Margate, and called It’s Not the Way I Want to Die (2005). There’s Self Portrait (Bath) of 2005, which consists of an old zinc tub, an elegantly thin neon tube and a tangle of barbed wire. Another work in neon, You Forgot to Kiss My Soul (2001), engages the attention for at least a second or two, in spite of its mawkish sentimentality.

Some of her appliqué blankets also have a kind of homespun, if foul-mouthed, interest, as if a series of quilts had been remade by someone with Tourette’s syndrome. (The first of these blankets, Hotel International — of 1993 — records her early life in her father’s Margate hotel.) It’s equally true, though, that anything — a pile of discarded plastic bags, say — would look good in these generous, coolly lit, beautifully proportioned spaces.

Bombarded by so much attention-seeking, even the most handsome appliqué blanket or well-focused colour photograph of the artist stuffing money into her vagina is unable to sustain interest for long. It would be easier to respond positively to the desperate, childish cries of “Me, me, me!” were the me concerned in any way engaging or stimulating. That is precisely what Emin is not. Her life, at least until the moment when, thanks to a farcically drunken and foul-mouthed appearance on Channel 4, she became notorious, seems pretty pointless, its tedium interrupted only by seemingly loveless encounters or by occasions such as the Margate disco-dancing championship of 1978, which she might have won had audience abuse not driven her to leave the stage in tears.

Admittedly, not everything on display traces and illustrates Emin’s sexual history. There are some drawings of birds. There is a filmed conversation with her mother, of such banality it makes an exchange between Coronation Street’s David and Gail Platt seem like Shakespeare. There is a model aeroplane in papier-mâché, which I took to be of a Vulcan bomber until someone pointed out that it looks a shade more like Concorde.

Much of the show concerns itself with Emin’s view of her own sexual history, however, and makes her appear, at least during her teenage years, like nobody so much as Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard. Here are some half-hearted watercolours, a pill bottle and other souvenirs of her first abortion. Here are endless drawings, all of them irritatingly indecisive, which, like 1995’s F***ing Down an Ally (sic), depict urgent couplings or sexual parts, most of them her own. Here are colour photographs of Emin naked, inviting us to admire a body, of which, to judge from press snaps of her in revealing clothes, she is extremely proud. Even the cover of the Edinburgh catalogue is based on a photograph of her from the waist down, holding a loaded paintbrush and wearing just an apron and black briefs that barely cover a firm back- side — itself an achievement for a 45-year-old. Our Tracey knows precisely what is expected of her.

It’s telling that the catalogue essay by Patrick Elliott, the curator of the exhibition, is entirely biographical. It lacks all critical and art-historical references, apart from the assertion that “Emin has turned her life into a public spectacle like no other artist before her”.

This may explain why the show is already proving hugely popular. Many visitors probably expect a voyeuristic thrill; others look forward to confessional, titillating outpourings by a damaged victim/beneficiary of dysfunctional contemporary society. That is why Emin is, after all, noteworthy. What gives her work its consequence is what she unwittingly reveals of the world we inhabit. There, celebrity is more important than real achievement, self-revelation more gripping than anything created by talent and a considerable imagination. For the artist herself, the chief purpose of art is as a means of achieving fame. God help us.

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

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