The Frieze Art Fair that takes place in London every October is a strange creature that has now become settled in the city’s calendar. The fair is divided into two sections, Frieze London and Frieze Masters. Come October, two massive tents, (in Kolkata you would call them pandals, but these are mega-pandals) are erected at two ends of Regent’s Park and the fun spreads across four days from Thursday to Sunday.
The F-London tent houses a grid of stalls rented by galleries selling contemporary art, while the F-Masters tent has galleries selling well-known artists from across the ages.
Even as you approach Regent’s Park from the Euston Road you can see that Frieze is very much a commercial jamboree aimed primarily at the highly moneyed class that treats London as its nesting ground.
Along with sponsors such as Deutsche Bank and a host of posh restaurants, the fair has had a long relationship with BMW, the car manufacturer. As you approach the entrance you can see a whole row of Beamers (as the English like to call them) lined up for use by the VVIPS, the models all latest and from the upper end of the range, the drivers all in ties and suits, some of them taking selfies in front of the particularly expensive models.
Higher end
At the entrance of the fair stand a scatter of security men and women. Again, you can tell these people are from the higher end of the security market, used to dealing with the wealthy, with just the correct level of unctuousness (too much would be cloying and would give the game away), and with those who threaten the wealthy, with swift, well-trained firmness.
There is a fair crowd thronging into the London tent on a Sunday, some people have passes, artists and art students and such, but many of the punters are paying the full £64 for the four days. There are VIP cards for those of us who can access them through connections, but even these have a hierarchy.
Exclusive lounge
I collect a turquoise coloured VIP card and my companion asks if we can immediately jump into one of the BMW limos and go for a ride. The answer is unfortunately not: the cars and the exclusive Lodha Lounge are available only to the VVIPs who have the black cards. As for us with our lowly turquoise, we can come and go from the venues as often as we like, and take the shuttle that runs between the southern end of the park to the Masters near the Camden Town end.
People look at an artwork entitled ‘Francesco’ by Urs Fischer.
Inside the contemporary tent it’s like a brightly lit fish market. The art varies in quality from the very good to the absurd, from the highly original to the highly derivative. As you jostle through the crowd you can see there are people who are very serious about buying art; wealthy women take pictures of the little name cards next to pieces, dressed-down men in non-showy apparel with just the expensive watch showing make calls to the wife asking if they should reserve a piece.
The staff in the stalls rock their Mac Airs and bow slightly from the waist when talking to the fat wallets. Empty glasses of champagne stand on little tables between the pictures, sculptures and video screens.
After a brief tour of the contemporary bazaar, we make our escape to the lovely autumn day outside. Instead of taking the shuttle we walk through Regent’s Park in all its summer-just-gone glory.
The Masters tent is the reason I look forward to Freize. Here the atmosphere is different. The lights are more subtle, the stalls larger, some of them dark caves with spotlights, and the art is of a much higher (and more expensive) quality.
The good thing about Frieze Masters is that you are always surprised by some work by a favourite artist that you haven’t seen before; equally, sometimes there are new discoveries of unknown modern artists as well as older objects that come from far deeper in the past. This time, among the pleasures were Japanese paintings, ceramics and samurai costumes, as well as one stall with exquisite Pahari miniatures.
Modern works
In terms of the moderns, there were works by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, and then paintings by Yayoi Kusama, Cy Twombly, Claes Oldenburg, all of which gladdened the eye and the heart.
Paintings on display. Photo: Reuters
There was a beautiful vase by Grayson Perry in which were embedded words and images, a small array of Avigdor Arikha’s beautiful drawing-paintings with sumi ink, and a treasure trove of Richard Diebenkorn’s paintings and drawings ranging from small still-lifes to the large California abstracts for which Diebenkorn is best known.
One particular conversation I overheard tells a lot about the Frieze expo. A Russian man was asking a gallerist some questions. “Warhol? Where he is from?” “Very, very famous American artist.” “Ah. Now these two works, they are similar, yes?” “Yes, he would make variations of the same silk-screen printed image, so no one image is coloured the same, but there are many variations of the basic image.” “How many variations exist of this one?” “Ooh, difficult to say, but in the market maybe 10 or 12.” “Ah. This is picture of…” “Dolly Parton.” “Ah, yes, Dolly Parton! Of course! How much is these two?” “Each of these would be... five million seven hundred thousand dollars.” “Ok. And you can give them to me by when?”
After a while, the eye tires, more out of satiation than anything else, and you wander out to the deck for a coffee and cigarette break. You watch the motley crowd eating and drinking, the rich, the students clutching their extortionately priced coffees, the children making a mess, the group of young women taking pictures of each other and discussing dating websites.
You gather stamina and you go in again. More art, more deals being made, some more lovely work, some boring stuff. A woman on the phone ‘Darling, I’ve paid for the small Doig oil but the Morandi was gone... no, the other Morandi was too expensive.’ Just as she says it your eyes alight on a small still life by Giorgio Morandi. The forms are beautiful, rendered with a quiet passion, repeated in other pictures you’ve seen, the repetition as precise and lovely as a note sequence being repeated with very slight variations in a raga sung by some great singer.
For a few minutes the crowd disappears, the smell of burning money leaves your nose, and you’re alone with the tiny painting. Then you snap back, and realise you need to get out of the tent and into the fresh air.
The columnist and filmmaker is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary . He edited Electric Feather: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories and was featured in Granta .
