Warming to the Frieze effect

It’s Wednesday afternoon in Regent’s Park and an immense white marquee glimmers through the trees. Above the old-fashioned formal flowerbeds, the lights of a neon sculpture cut through the dullish light. People wandering past me have “dressed-down” but their well-cut clothes mean money. A bright little biplane like a child’s toy wheels into sight in the sky trailing a banner that says “POP ART IS GAGOSIAN”. And the person coming towards me along the wide path, almost absurdly, as if we were on the set of a movie, is Tracey Emin. Great boots.

Inside the marquee, I have heard five different languages before I get past the security barrier, although their speakers look remarkably similar. You could never mistake an art crowd for, say, a concert crowd: most music people look like badly wrapped parcels. The long white aisles of booths in this modern-day souk, where the art is artfully packed into smaller spaces than in any gallery, feel almost unreal. Is this my town?

The Frieze Art Fair is just five years old and already it is hard to remember what London in early October was like before it existed. The Frieze effect has moved and spread with such speed that the capital’s always rich art scene is transformed, each year at this time, into a full-on jamboree. The commercial galleries, naturally, want to take advantage of the fact that big buyers from all over the world are in town, the big auction houses have begun to time their contemporary sales with Frieze Week, and the public galleries are determined not to be left out – after all, they too rely on this nexus of sympathetic money for sponsorship and support. Every one of them wants to put on their party frock and come to the ball. It’s probably safe to say that nowhere in the world could you see as much fine art in one place as is laid out in front of us in London this week.

Visiting Frieze itself can be a mixed pleasure. I don’t find art fairs any sort of aesthetic experience – the work is too random, jumbled and oddly juxtaposed and I miss the cool and expert curatorial touch to which our eyes are so accustomed. But there is quite a different kind of pleasure in turning a tight corner and suddenly finding a striking and powerful work whose authorship you recognise, or one you didn’t know and didn’t expect and then spotting nearby one of those “are-you-kidding?” pieces that seem pointlessly composed of a dozen Lego bricks and four trolley wheels. The sublime and the ridiculous jostle for attention, with much in between. But the atmosphere at a fair is quite different from that of a gallery. Despite the stratospheric prices (not that there is, of course, anything so crude as a price tag), art has come down off its high horse and turned into shopping.

It may be this sense of intimacy that drew the 63,000 visitors who last year paid their £18.50 to wander these aisles and gaze – at the people as much as the work. It’s a steeper entry fee than a regular gallery would have the culot to charge and, if the fair’s organisers intend it to be prohibitive, they are nonetheless predicting an even bigger influx this year: each year so far has seen a 35 per cent increase in numbers. Their estimate that 85 per cent of those who come to Frieze have no intention of buying anything seems conservative, not only because Londoners and visitors alike regard it as a spectator event but also because this fair has become a place simply to see and be seen, in the professional sphere, and to meet one’s counterparts from other countries. Meetings are proposed and arranged “at Frieze” – just as they are, in the publishing world, “at Frankfurt” – because it is assumed that you’ll be there. In a relatively short space of time it has taken its place among the A-list contemporary art events in the calendar, beside the Venice biennale, the art fairs at Miami and Basel and a few others.

The ripples it has spread through London’s art scene can be felt all around. This week alone, Tate Modern opened its mighty Louise Bourgeois retrospective as well as its new Turbine Hall installation, the National Portrait Gallery its expansive Pop Art Portraits show and the Barbican its Seduced exhibition devoted to sex and eroticism, while Georg Baselitz is running at the Royal Academy, Matthew Barney at the Serpentine and The Painting of Modern Life at the Hayward, to name only the most prominent. “It’s magnificent,” one already exhausted gallerist, who was visiting from Rome, said this week, “but it’s nuts. Everyone wants to see you and talk, you want to see everything, it’s impossible to keep up.”

Nuts it may be but this week no self-respecting London gallery could afford to be left out and it is in the commercial sector that the effect is most dramatic. One of the biggest shifts in the art scene in recent years is the trend in London’s Cork Street and the city’s new East End gallery district towards curated shows that include borrowed works – once the province of the non-commercial sector – so that it is now regularly possible to see museum-quality exhibitions in what were once posh shops. No wonder the established institutions have to work to keep up: not only is Frieze – and by extension other art fairs – seen by thousands of people as pure exhibition, but the time-honoured role of the public galleries and museums is being challenged by the sheer scale and quality on offer elsewhere, too.

The trend came to many people’s notice a few years ago, when the Gagosian gallery in London borrowed a Francis Bacon triptych from Tate and displayed it with two others, one of which was for sale. It was the first time the three pieces had ever been seen together, so it was an art event so exciting in itself that for most people the marketing aspect was not even noticeable. But as a selling tool, it must have been dynamite. Art and Mammon were both very happy.

Since then, the once cast-iron divide between shows where you bought things and shows where you only looked at them has continued to dissolve. For instance, the Helly Nahmad gallery in Cork Street this week opened the second of its lapidary exhibitions devoted to a small section of Picasso’s work: last year (during Frieze week, naturally) it was the period in the early 1950s the great man spent with his wife Jacqueline at the Villa Californie, another show that assembled pictures never exhibited together before; this year’s superb selection is devoted to the artist and his models. Some are for sale, should you be in the market for a nice little Picasso, but for most of us this exhibition is just pure pleasure.

Not far away but at the other end of the spectrum, the best of contemporary art has come to the high street this week – literally, in the case of Conrad Shawcross’s installation in Selfridges. “Nobody will come,” the young sculptor said gloomily before his opening on Tuesday, “there are nine other shows opening tonight alone.” His fears were unfounded but their cause was justified: the evening’s other openings even included one at his own gallery, Victoria Miro, for the respected Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Elsewhere, the temples of art shadow each other’s doings: Marlborough has Louise Bourgeois works on paper, as a fascinating addition to Tate Modern’s exhibition, while Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen have a new show at the Waddington galleries as well as their impressive big yellow works in Frieze’s Sculpture Park.

Perhaps the most remarkable of all is Gagosian, whose new pop art show sets out to rival the National Portrait Gallery and the Hayward in celebrating 50 years of the genre. Its exhibition Pop Art Is... meets London’s sternest test – the eye of my colleague Jackie Wullschlager – so I’ll say no more here. But to me Gagosian’s banner, cheekily flying over the tents of Frieze itself behind that jaunty biplane, summed up the extraordinary confidence and spirits of London’s Frieze effect. Bubbles and crashes, market dips and doomy predictions may make their mark when the party’s over and the figures are revealed but the mood in London this week is untouched by any of that. Even the most cynical of commentators have been forced to admit this is a wonderful, extraordinarily rich buffet of art and creativity and extravagant invention: the only difficulty is to stuff it all in. As I met one arts writer hurtling from one show to the next, papers and catalogues falling from his groaning bag, he grinned and said “The only way to get round this lot would be to be...” – he looked round for inspiration, not far to seek in a London park – “a pigeon”.

The Frieze Art Fair, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, Regent’s Park, London NW1; ends on Sunday. Tel: 0870 890 0514