Regent’s Park has once again transformed into the epicenter of the global art market, but visitors expecting to find the cutting edge of contemporary creativity may be disappointed. While Frieze London is marketed as a platform defining the artistic zeitgeist and discovering tomorrow’s stars, the reality within its marquee often feels like a sprawling, mundane marketplace. The contemporary fair, with its endless white corridors and crammed booths, struggles to match the imaginative power found elsewhere. Even the 16th-century works by followers of Hieronymus Bosch at the neighboring Frieze Masters—which feature screaming figures and hybrid avian musicians—offer a more provocative experience than the bulk of the contemporary selection. While someone with a bird’s head and wings plays the bagpipes, n aked people climb out of the earth and run around waving their arms and screaming. It’s my favourite artwork at this year’s Frieze but don’t go looking for this wildly imaginative outrage among the heaps of contemporary art at Frieze London. I’m sorry to say I was bored rigid in Frieze London. Many people attend, I imagine, hoping to be informed and excited by the newest, coolest art, but you’ll see more genuinely avant garde wonders in the Bake Off tent. A dreadful way of seeing, and an elegant white marquee full of gallery booths along endless white corridors is a ghastly way of showing them. Things you can put on your wall are still the most collectible art. You will find works by established modern “masters”, many of whom are deceased: a series of stained, graffiti-laden visual poems by Cy Twombly, a grey, bleak nude by Leon Kossoff, at Frieze Masters.
The contemporary fair’s success rate remains surprisingly low, with only about one in ten works resonating as truly significant. While artists such as Tracey Emin, Waqas Khan, Do Ho Suh, Catherine Opie, and Zanele Muholi maintain a strong presence, they are surrounded by a sea of uninspired paintings. Even notable exceptions, like Wolfgang Tillmans’ 1994 inkjet print ‘Paul, nude, golf ball,’ feel like echoes of the past rather than markers of a new era. The event appears heavily optimized for wealthy collectors—ranging from hedge-fund managers to high-profile figures—who gather on VIP days to acquire works like the Anselm Kiefer piece that recently fetched nearly a million pounds. Inkjet print by Wolfgang Tillmans called Paul, nude, golf ball in which the naked Paul has his elbows on the floor and his close-cropped head bowed between them in apparent despair, while the white ball beside him eerily mirrors the pale flesh of his bony back, the first thing here that held me at all was a two-metre-tall. But it’s not new – it dates from 1994. It’s not as rewarding as visiting galleries which can be interesting spaces. But it’s obvious that it really serves the needs of sellers and the tastes of a certain kind of extremely wealthy consumer. Hedge-fund managers, retired hedge-fund managers, their children, and – is that George Osborne? – who were actually here to buy this stuff, this is most apparent on VIP day when I enter along with a host of tech bros. At Frieze Masters, I was about to ask the price of an Anselm Kiefer work, matted vegetation clogging its surface, when an elderly couple beat me to it. The price was just shy of a million quid. Another of its artists, Andy Woll, shows a row of lazily brushed mountain views that are just as vacuous. Holley, a musician and artist from Birmingham, Alabama who held me spellbound a couple of years ago when he showed how he can create beauty from a random piece of wire, is a true American great who stands out in this blandfest. So do Tracey Emin, Waqas Khan, Do Ho Suh, Catherine Opie and Zanele Muholi – but in all honesty the success rate at Frieze London is about one in 10.
Some highlights manage to pierce through the blandness, such as Helen Chadwick’s ‘Piss Flowers,’ a collection of organic, mineral-like sculptures that serve as a modern classic. Similarly, the assemblage work by Lonnie Holley at the Edel Assanti booth provides a rare, visceral connection to reality. However, many contemporary booths lean toward the vacuous, exemplified by Wanda Koop’s candle paintings or Rosalind Nashashibi’s floral-bordered compositions, which feel better suited for a gift shop than a serious art exhibition. None of which are much good, interspersed with photographs which tend to be a little better, there are endless paintings. At Los Angeles’ Night Gallery booth, Wanda Koop’s Radiance-Together depicts two candles burning side by side in a blue and purple setting. Meanwhile, at the appropriately named Grimm Gallery, Rosalind Nashashibi – better known for her films – exhibits a silly painting of lovers between flowery borders. Eerily lovely, enigmatically organic: they’re Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers, a chance to own examples of a modern classic by this tremendous artist who died in 1996, now here’s something different – a row of white mineral-like growths. And at the back of the Edel Assanti booth is Lonnie Holley’s assemblage of a water tap on a rusty pipe entwined with wire and two green bottles on a rough wooden plinth.
Frieze Masters, while visually more stimulating, presents its own set of ethical quandaries. The fair functions as a treasure trove of the ancient and the expensive, offering everything from 1896-era silverware and Arabian carpets to fossilized Triceratops skulls that are 68 million years old. These items are often marketed as “museum quality,” a designation that strikes many as an understatement, yet the items are destined for the private collections of the ultra-wealthy rather than public institutions. This trend of “dinosaur tourism” among the elite continues to drive up prices, effectively pricing museums out of the market for significant specimens. If something has value after 50, 500, or 68,000,000 years, it’s probably good. Fossilised Triceratops skull, that 68m years is no exaggeration for here on sale is a triple-horned.
The commercialization of the past at Frieze Masters is striking. Stalls are filled with items ripped from their original contexts: manuscript pages cut from codices, funeral masks removed from Egyptian coffins, and stone heads from 2nd-century Palmyra. The atmosphere is that of a festival of capitalism run amok, where historical objects are fetishized as bright, isolated decor. This commodification reaches a peak at the Colnaghi booth, where African religious carvings are displayed alongside a 1920 Giacomo Grosso nude painting, explicitly sexualized with high heels and silk. It serves as a stark reminder of the critique once offered by John Berger, who viewed such displays of art as mere playthings for Western capitalism.
