Rembrandt painted more self-portraits than anyone until Picasso, not because he was a narcissist, or because he couldn’t afford a model, but because the man and his paintings were the same impulse.

Our idea of the self changed dramatically with the Renaissance, then again in the Romantic period, and yet further with the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Jung. It is likely that virtual reality, and the computer-modified human beings shortly promised by science, will alter our concept of self once more, and profoundly. Yet artists will go on doing what they have always done — making work out of their deepest places, tangling personality, experience, and imagination all together, without separation.

This should be cause for celebration, but when tabloid-style journalism concentrates its efforts on the so-called lifestyles of artists, any artists, in any medium, the public often feels that the thing is just a colossal self-indulgence.

We are confused about the connection between art and life. When Carol Ann Duffy recently published Rapture, her collection of love poems, she wanted to make it clear that while the drive for the poems had come from somewhere agonisingly personal, the poems themselves were not personal. Once the artist has finished with the work, it is no longer a private dialogue, but a public declaration. The relationship is between the viewer or the reader or the listener, and the work of art. The relationship cannot be between the audience and the artist.

When so much of our talk about art now concentrates on the artist, it is difficult to remember that the legitimate response should lie elsewhere. But it is easier to talk about the artist and his/her money, cocaine, sex life, eccentricities and so on.

You may feel that someone like Tracey Emin, who has fiercely put herself into everything she does, including lists of lovers, and unmade, condom-scattered beds, cannot claim any privacy, nor any right to an art that exists without her. Her writings are painfully honest, and certainly some of them should have been edited out by someone who loves her. Nevertheless, Strangeland is more than Tracey’s diary, just as her bed and her tent and her blankets are more than private displays that happen to have attracted a lot of attention.

Tracey’s success is not in her showmanship, it is in the curious fact of her alchemy; she has been able to turn her own private world into one that speaks clearly to people all over the world.

There are millions of people with unmade beds and obsessive notebooks filled with sketches and jottings. Tracey is different because she has transformed the personal into the public. This is no mean feat. It is not typical. Not anyone can do it. Very few people can do it. Art is not a democracy. Much as we might not like it, Tracey is something special. She is not the tabloid hype. She is the real thing.

There is a particular problem for women artists. It is assumed that women deal in the personal, the confessional, the small, the intimate, and that larger and loftier concerns still belong to male ambition.

Women are judged by different rules. When I made myself into a character in my own fiction, it was called autobiography. When Paul Auster, or Milan Kundera do it, it is called metafiction.

Antony Gormley is taken seriously when he talks about the body, in particular, his own body, as the centre of everything. When Tracey does it, it is often reinterpreted as publicity-seeking display, or self-obsession.

The fact is that art has to be taken on its own terms, and not reread or interpreted through the distorting lens of the artist. Questions of gender or sexuality or colour or religion are relevant when the work is in progress, but not when it has been made.

Yes, the personal life is in there, but even with something as intimate as Tracey Emin’s Strangeland, it would be a mistake not to recognise the bigger, bolder enterprise of finding a voice for others, and offering a way of seeing that is both absolutely your own, and somehow for everyone.

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