Feminist artist Cosey Fanni Tutti says Britney Spears was ‘manufactured and abused’

Feminist music pioneer Cosey Fanni Tutti has expressed her sympathy for Britney Spears, describing the pop star’s experience in the spotlight as “abuse from beginning to end”.

Spears, 41, just released her long-awaited memoir The Woman in Me, in which she describes her childhood, her rise to fame and her battle to be freed from the conservatorship controlled by her father, Jamie Spears.

The book has received positive reviews and was an instant best-seller, with over a million copies sold in the US alone in its first week of release.

“When you think of Britney Spears you think of this pop icon,” Tutti, born Christine Carol Newby, told The Independent. “She was manufactured and she was held down as a person, as a woman. It was just abuse from beginning to end.”

The musician and performance artist was speaking at the launch of Women in Revolt, a new exhibition at Tate Britain, which celebrates British feminism between 1970 to 1990.

“Inequality was what we were resisting, in our own ways,” she said. “You didn’t always agree, but everyone got on with it.”

Tutti’s comments about Spears come shortly after American singer Timbaland received a huge backlash for suggesting Justin Timberlake should have have “put a muzzle” on the “Womanizer” artist before her memoir was released.

Spears’s book makes a number of claims about her Noughties relationship with fellow pop star Timberlake, including that she had an abortion while they were together because he “definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy”.

She also said Timberlake’s 2002 music video for “Cry Me a River” depicted her as a “harlot”.

“I wanted to call and say, ‘JT, you gotta put a muzzle on that,’” Timbaland, who collaborated with Timberlake on “Cry Me a Rvier”, joked during a recent panel at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. He later issued a brief apology.

The music industry has yet to experience its own #MeToo movement, Tutti said, observing that female artists “seem to get more criticism” than men.

She published her own memoir, Art Sex Music, in 2017 – the same year the MeToo movement emerged.

In it, she reflects on her work as a member of the pioneering industrial group Throbbing Gristle, and her notorious Prostitution show in 1976 that infamously caused Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn to brand her a “wrecker of civilisation”, shortly before he was arrested for indecent exposure.

“I think sexuality’s really important as a woman,” Tutti said, addressing the backlash she received to some of her early work, including from fellow feminists,

“Being comfortable with your sexuality is incredibly important, and I don’t think it should be pushed to one side, I really don’t. I think it’s a mistake. But to each their own.”

Women in Revolt is at Tate Britain until 7 April.

The exhibition recieved a five-star review from art critic Mark Hudson, who wrote: “This is a marvellously rich exhibition of work that has largely been omitted from the official story of art in Britain. This is partly because art by women has tended to get less attention than art by men, but far more because this is art with a message.”

He continued: “It sets out to challenge, first and foremost in the field of sexual politics, but by extension in every aspect of British life. You don’t tend to get thanked for that, however much the art establishment likes to think it veers towards the radical. So most of these artists are, incredibly, only now getting their moment in the sun.”