The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is to be complimented on its decision to show a retrospective of Tracey Emin’s work.

The exhibition will attract many people who would not usually think of ever going near a gallery. Along with the likes of Damien Hirst, Emin has become an icon, but her work is not simply about shocking the public: to consider only the sexual content of her art is to put too much emphasis on one aspect of her work.

So the gallery’s decision to warn all visitors to the exhibition, entitled 20 Years, that it contains work of an explicit nature and insist that anyone under the age of 16 be accompanied by an adult, is worrying. It sends a signal that viewers are only looking for the sexual messages that are built in to many of the works.

That is not the reason that Emin is a great artist. If you look at her drawings and paintings — which are where her gift lies, rather than the famous unmade bed, with its condoms and knickers — they are concerned with her almost painful honesty.

You could say that any painting of the human body — I’m thinking of the great tradition of the nude — has an element of the erotic. There are aspects of the work of Auguste Rodin, the great sculptor, which are full of imagery which you could say is harmful to young people. He made sensual images, but art transcends the pornographic or sexual: the real reason for making art is to express the feeling that through it you can heal the most painful wounds and make sense of the most difficult aspects of your life.

Emin is stronger when she moves away from her personal experience and you get some remarkable and reassuring evidence of her undoubted delight in making art. At last year’s Venice Biennale, where she represented Britain, I was particularly impressed by her powers as a painter and a draughtsman. She knows how to make marks that are significant and she is obviously highly gifted and committed to the business of being an artist.

At the biennale I was talking to a passer-by who could not see what the fuss was about. My advice was to look not at the subject matter — which was about Emin’s chaotic and sad love life — but at the energy in the drawing. Whether she uses a brush or any other instrument, she makes the visual equivalent of music.

We must also stop this nonsense that the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art should exist only to promote the work of Scottish artists. If Tracey Emin is delighted to show at the gallery, it honours the gallery and places Scottish art where it belongs: in an international context. This is why it is called the Edinburgh International Festival.

A great gallery has a responsibility to educate and the national gallery is the equivalent of the Hampden stadium when it plays host to an international match.

Emin’s life story will appeal to many young people. She has a lot to say — about her environment, about growing up on the south coast, and about the fate that she escaped through her art.

She has emerged from a tough background as a hard working professional maker of works that have a place in the history of modern art. Her story should be bigger for young people than the suggestion that there might be harmful images in her show. They are not harmful if you understand the nature of the work.

Tracey Emin 20 Years runs from August 2 to November 9, 2008 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

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