The great British art disaster" was a phrase Tracey Emin was using yesterday in the wake of the destruction of two of her best-known, and therefore most valuable, pieces. Like all her contemporaries, she is consummately media-savvy, and she was using the expression sardonically, quoting the broadbrush media take on the story.

But, typically, she was also using it in a felt way, projecting human qualities on to the chipboard and corrugated-iron beach hut from the seafront at Whitstable, which was one of the hundreds of artworks from the Saatchi collection that are believed to have been destroyed in the blaze. They were qualities that were always inherent in the title she gave the ramshackle and inherently worthless structure, when she decided to wrench it from its moorings and reconfigure it as art in 1999: The Last Thing I Said to You is Don't Leave Me Here.

These are the words, Emin says, that have been repeating in her head as pictures of the beach hut and her famous tent (Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995) have flashed up in round-the-clock rotation during television coverage of the fire. Like down-at-heel hotel rooms in the novels of Graham Greene, these were powerfully eroticised spaces with associations that spun out far beyond the aesthetic, not least for Emin herself. "It had stood in Whitstable for 25 years before I had it," she says of the blue shack that she bought with Sarah Lucas and shared with her boyfriend of the time, the gallerist Carl Freedman. "It travelled to America and back again. It had a life. Like the tent. It had real spirit. I never imagined them not being in the world."

Early yesterday, Emin sent out a text message to the world at large that read like one of her banner blankets: "I was OK now I'm HURT. BUT NO ONE DIED and IDEAS CONTINUE. The WAR in ARAQ," she added, in trademark Mad Tracey from Margate spelling, "is WRONG x."

Speaking later, she explained that the bit about the war wasn't as much a non sequitur as it appeared to be. "It's happened - the British art disaster - and it's in the papers between this war, with people being bombed at their wedding, and 500 people being washed away in flash floods in the Dominican Republic. So it's very difficult as an artist to say that I'm very upset - I'm going to cry because my art has been burned."

At the same time, Emin recognises that in a society united not so much by common beliefs any more as common images - images like the ones with which we have come to be on first-name terms: the bricks, the bed, the tent, the shark, the blood head, Myra, the cows - the violent destruction of these images is not nothing; the Momart fire is high up the news for a reason. "Oh, it's part of the national psyche now," she says. "'Art collector'. Everybody knows what that means. People didn't need it spelling out. When those pictures of the burning building came on the television everybody knew. Everybody knew definitely something has happened."

It explains, perhaps, why news reports have talked of works of art - insensate objects, after all - having "perished". Of members of the art community, as they gathered for an Edward Hopper dinner at Tate Modern on Tuesday night, being "profoundly shocked and saddened by the news". The uncertainty, and the time it has taken to positively identify the works that have been destroyed, have increased the similarity between this event and others, such as plane crashes or mining disasters, where it is human lives that have been lost.

A painting had an active life of about 30 years, according to Marcel Duchamp; after that, it died - visually, emotionally and spiritually. Readymades, on the other hand - works of art created not by the hand or skill but by the mind and decision of the artist - can be replenished to infinity. If lost or destroyed, a readymade could be recreated without difficulty by anyone, which gave it a sort of permanence denied the masterpiece. So when his sister, in the course of clearing out his Paris studio, threw out both his bottle rack and his bicycle wheel, which she decided were useless junk, Duchamp simply went down on to 14th Street in New York where he was living and bought more of the same.

Since the Momart outpost at Leyton went up, some commentators have made a qualitative distinction between paintings and "real" sculptures lost in the fire - one-off, handmade pieces which it is impossible to replace - and "found" objects such as Emin's beach hut and nylon crawl-in tent which, they have implied, it is simple enough for her to go shopping for at a branch of Millets or an ordinary high street camping shop. To argue that, though, she maintains, is to miss the point.

"[The tent]'s a seminal thing. It was that moment and that time in my life. It's me sitting in my flat in Waterloo sewing all the names on. It took me six months to make. It just fitted inside my living room, which was 10ft by 12ft, and the TV just fitted inside the tent. I couldn't remake that time in my life again any more than I could remake the piece. And anyway, I haven't slept with anybody for a year."

In her castings of the insides and undersides of common objects such as wardrobes and baths and beds, it is the space left by an object when it is gone - negative space - that Rachel Whiteread is memorialising. "A commodity is an ideology made material," Michael Landy took as his slogan when he publicly ground all his worldly goods to dust at an abandoned Littlewoods store on Oxford Street in London a couple of years ago. Item A4 in the inventory of Landy's destroyed belongings was Be Faithful to Your Dreams, "embroidered Tracey Emin handkerchief in box from Momart"; item A90 was Clown, a gloss painting on wood by Gary Hume, the destruction of which almost caused a rift in the two men's friendship. Hume was uncomfortable with it at first. He said he understood the idea but he didn't like it much. In the end though, like Willem de Kooning, who 50 years earlier had reluctantly donated a drawing to Robert Rauschenberg who wanted to transform it by rubbing it out, Hume liked the result: he has admitted to being nearly moved to tears by what Landy had committed himself to achieving.

"It's funny, because once you rub something out, it's still there, really, isn't it?" Damien Hirst once commented of the de Kooning-Rauschenberg collaboration. "I mean, it actually, physically is there. It's not like a blank piece of paper."

For now, Emin's tent and her seaside beach hut and other works yet to be identified are ingrained on the common memory. The original Duchamp readymades disappeared eventually, but their subversive power continued to grow.