The Fag Show

The cigarette is a powerful modern icon. The budding Hollywood star dangles one between her lips to suggest maturity and recklessness. Tobacco ads play on the idea that the product provides a naughty pleasure, an indulgence for adults in control of their lives. Smoking, the billboards tell us, is seriously sexy.

Sarah Lucas, a prominent figure in the new wave of young British artists, used to buy into this message. In a self portrait from a few years ago, she is smoking defiantly. But last summer she gave up, going cold turkey from a …