If you wanted to find a middle-aged man in a bright orange suit, matching tie and sneakers, Frieze is a good place to start looking. I found one. Or maybe he was a limited edition existing in several reproductions. Certainly, he was frequently spotted: conspiratorial of aspect, he was stooped and crouched over a mobile with body language saying ‘serious business’. I overheard: ‘Ah, Corinna. Va bene? How are prices in Zurigo?’
Long before you reach Frieze’s vast tented sites in Regent’s Park there are signs of danger. Extraordinary shoes and statement hair and rucked-up skinny trousers start appearing in a fall-out zone about half a mile away from the BMW VIP drop-off area and the Mercedes-Benz shuttle buses.
The French dealers tend towards the floppy, well-shampooed fringe which can be meaningfully flicked. The Germans prefer more aggressive, buzz-cut styles. The French wear cashmere cardigans under suits with open-necked shirts, the Germans go for more severe architectural fashions.
Since 2003, London’s Frieze Art Fair has been the ultimate pop-up. Ten years before, frieze (lower-case) was an ambitious start-up magazine, the first to publish an interview with Damien Hirst. Now it rivals — I think probably bests — Basel Miami, Hong Kong, Maastricht and the other global celebrity petting zoos.
Tom Wolfe satirised the mood at Miami where acquisitive billionaires in Bermuda shorts stampede towards status trophies. Frieze is more refined, but those lines of Henry James come to mind. Of the great men who first rudely industrialised, then politely aestheticised America — Carnegie, Frick, Kress and Vanderbilt — he wrote: ‘There was money in the air… With huge chequebooks instead of spears and battleaxes’, they pillaged Europe.
Today we have Frieze to do that for us. The generic art fair is one of the defining phenomena of our age.
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