Emin took a phlegmatic view of her work's destruction, saying, "The news comes between Iraqi weddings being bombed and people dying in the Dominican Republic in flash floods, so we have to get it into perspective." But she was upset at the public reaction to the fire, pointing both to lack of cultural understanding—"The majority of the British public have no regard or no respect to what me and my peers do, to the point that they laugh at a disaster like a fire"—and to lack of compassion: "It is just not fair and it's not funny and it's not polite and it's bad manners. I would never laugh at a disaster like that—I just have some empathy and sympathy with people's loss."