BritArt and babies

It is a bright, cold April day and Tracey Emin is perched by the flickering gas fire at her local, The Golden Heart in Spitalfields, owned by Emin's great mate Sandra, who calls everyone "babe". Emin had ducked in so quietly that I didn't notice her until she stood in front of me, unfolding a huge glistening red and blue scarf. Underneath she is wearing Helmut Lang jeans and a gold Vivienne Westwood top that quivers over her amazing boobs - she has the torso of Marilyn Monroe - and the flat stomach of a teenager.

She is confident and glamorous. Though with her tiny face, skinny limbs, lovely coffee eyes and funny bulging upper lip, you can't quite make up your mind if she is beautiful. I don't think she thinks she is. She purses her mouth awkwardly for the pictures (she lost her top teeth to calcium deficiency as a child); a funny mixture of defensiveness and sweetness, like Courtney Love crossed with My Little Pony.

Tracey Emin is, of course, famous for her shocking, grungy BritArt - mainly her bed, with its empty vodka bottles, used condoms and discarded knickers, and her tent embroidered with the names of everyone she had ever slept with. In person she is remarkably easy-going.

She talks in a soft voice, doesn't bully you and actually thinks about your questions. But just as you are lulled into a sense of security, her alarming honesty leaps up and whacks you in the face. "That's when I had my two abortions," she remarks casually when I ask what she was doing 15 years ago.

Emin has agreed to meet to talk about Saatchi's vast new gallery in the County Hall building on the South Bank, because she thinks it's fantastic. It opens on Thursday, and her notorious bed (testament to a five-day bender of depression and debauchery) is to have pride of place; Damien Hirst's shark will gnash alongside as part of a big Hirst retrospective. "I think it's brilliant we've got an art space dedicated to contemporary British art, and the fact it's between the two Tates is really good as well," Emin says. "It's like a gift to London, and I think it's long overdue."

She is scheduled to have her own blockbuster show at the gallery, but she remarks to my surprise that she might easily give up art. It turns out that she wants work on a bigger scale. "What I want to do is get really, really, really filthy rich and design lidos beside the Thames," she explains. There was a lido in Margate, where she grew up, but it's filled with concrete now. "And make loads of money for charity. It would be a nice thing to do. You get to a point in your life where you've done so much for yourself, you think it's time to start giving back."

Would she really stop making art? "Well, I would see a lido as art - just making art in a different way." She grins. "I want to make something really beautiful, that's really big and will last a long time. So when aeroplanes are flying over the Thames the captain can say, 'If you look down on your left, you'll see the Tracey Emin Lido.'"

Is it achievable? Emin flashes her wry, scrunched grin. "I think so. Most things I've wanted to do in my life I've done. For someone who left school at 13 I think I'm doing all right."

There's no getting round the fact that the new Saatchi gallery confirms that the worst has happened: the enfants terribles of the BritArt scene have become the Establishment. Emin electrified the art world the previous decade by "vomiting" - her description - up her shame and anger about her being raped aged 13, her promiscuity as a poor teenager in Margate, her VD, her abortions.

At the time, her art dealer, Jay Jopling, claimed, "Tracey has become an Everywoman by laying her soul bare and allowing the public to feed off it. An artist's identity has never been as open as Tracey's." But now the outcast is rich and fawned-over, on friendly terms with the likes of Madonna and Robbie Williams.

Emin will be 40 in July. But she claims she isn't bothered. "I'm so much more looking forward to being 40 than I was to being 20. My twenties were crap. And my lifestyle has changed so dramatically, it's fantastic: I don't want to go back to the way it was. I can travel abroad now; I've got complete freedom of choice. The only thing about it is, you can go completely up your own backside. My well-known mates can't believe it when I take the Tube. I go, 'Well, what am I supposed to do: have a chauffeur-driven car?'" She is, however, planning to hire a housekeeper.

I ask if her work has changed as much as her lifestyle. She surprises me by saying she thinks it has, "and I want to change it back. I never used to do many exhibitions, I was always doing projects. I opened up The Tracey Emin Museum in Waterloo" - this was an ironic joke, as in 1995 hardly anyone had heard of her - "and I did the shop with Sarah Lucas." (They called themselves the Birds and made T-shirts saying things like "I'm so f*cky.")

She grins. "I want to do more stuff like that. I'm 40 soon, and last year I nearly killed myself with f***-off shows. If you've got four major deadlines you are going to have a lot of stress. I'm an artist, not a stockbroker, I'm supposed to enjoy my life. Last year I put on loads of weight and didn't go out at all; I was working 18-hour days and it was not fun, and not a brilliant year, especially toward the end."

This was partly down to her break-up with her on-off artist boyfriend of five years, Mat Collishaw, 37. He apparently doesn't want children, while Emin is obviously running out of time, though Madonna has reassured her she isn't.

For years Emin has struggled over whether she wants a baby or not, alternately saying she was and wasn't broody, perhaps partly because she was so keen on Collishaw. It is clearly a sore point. When I ask where she is on the baby front she scrunches up her little face and growls: "Well, I'm not, am I? I've said this before. I'm not trying to have a baby. You need to have sex to have a baby, right? Don't you? Unless there's something I don't know."

Right, I say, but I didn't know if she and Collishaw were together. Are they? "No. Well, sort of. I'm sort of not. It's not brilliant," Emin mutters. "Ask Mat. But I'm not saying anything about it. I'm just saying a baby's not happening."

And is she cool about that? "Um. Yeah. I suppose so," she answers gloomily. "Because you don't have any choice, do you? Most blokes are happy to make a commitment about getting their leg over, but when it comes to a commitment for life, they run a f***ing mile."

She would obviously prefer to stay with Collishaw who, like her, has a dark streak. An examiner at Goldsmiths reportedly refused to mark his degree show because it incorporated photos of murdered women, and, while Emin names him as one of her top two artists along with Vermeer, she admits "he is pretty shocking. Some artists make work about Jack the Ripper, but the thing about Mat is he actually could be Jack the Ripper - his work's so edgy."

If he's out of the picture, maybe she can find a guy who wants marriage. But she doubts they exist. "Are there?" she asks incredulously, when I said I thought there were men out there who wanted to settle down. "All the men I know run away."

The suggestion they might find her terrifying provokes a long silence. "This guy was chatting me up," she answers at last, "and I said to him: 'Before you go any further, show me on this beer bottle the length and width of your dick.' He just walked away. I thought it was hilarious. I went: 'What do you want from me?'

"He said, 'I'd like to take you to dinner.' No he didn't. He wanted to chat me up. But it's not happening." Not if she terrorises them like that, certainly. She might want to rethink her strategy if she wants to settle down. But she says grimly that she has missed her chance.

"I'm too late. I'm set in my ways. Even if I had a baby I'd be travelling round the world with it, I wouldn't be like the Beckhams, would I? And they're about 15 years younger than me."

Still, she says she is happy and probably is - in that get-fit sort-your-life mode women go into after breakups. She is just back from two months in Australia, which she loved so much she intends to buy a place there. She is also cheering herself up with lots of retail therapy.

"I spent vast amounts on clothes, antiques and air tickets. On Saturday I missed a flight to Holland by five minutes because the woman wouldn't let me go through. She said: 'The best I can do is give you a standby for 1 o'clock.' I said, 'No, the best I can do is rip the ticket up and go and get a British Airways' one.' She was pissed off."

Her singleton lifestyle consists of mornings devoted to satellite TV - "I get up really early and watch UK Style, all the Changing Room programmes and House Doctor: I'm totally addicted" - and in the evenings she has a cuppa with Sandra or swims at the gym.

The woman who was famously drunk on a live TV discussion for the 1997 Turner Prize and then walked out saying she was going to phone her mum seems a distant memory.

She only drinks white-wine spritzers these days. "And I've stopped drinking Coca-Cola, I've stopped drinking coffee. It's just self-preservation. I don't want to look ugly. I want to be beautiful. I'm not Liz Hurley, I know, but you try and hold onto what you have."

She flashes her shy grin, revealing her crooked lower teeth. "And I promised myself a year off this year, and I'm gonna take it. I'm talking to the BBC about getting funding for a feature film, so that's what I want to do next. It's about growing up in Margate - but not autobiographical." (Emin was conceived on what was meant to be her parents' last night together and spent her first seven years living in the hotel they owned in Margate; her dad was Turkish Cypriot and had a wife and family elsewhere.)

I ask if she feels she revealed too much of herself in her art. A look of pain shadows her face. "I said once I felt as if I'd raped myself - and that's one of the worst rapes of all. But that was because I was exhausted. I don't feel like that now. I feel much more energetic. I want to go out there."

Which she's about to do. It's six o' clock, and she and Sandra are off to a charity party. Tomorrow is the opening bash for the Saatchi Gallery - "it's a real hot ticket" - and next up is her 40th. But the woman famous for putting everything out there clams up when I ask if it will be in London.

What's the betting she has a baby this time next year? Fairly high, I'd say.

The bad girl has grown up.

The Saatchi Gallery is at County Hall, South Bank (020 7823 2363). Entry £8.50. The Damien Hirst Retrospective runs from 17 April.