Visitors to London’s Frieze art fair, which opens on Thursday, will be immediately struck by a huge, alien object apparently crushing part of the capacious white tent that houses the event. The project, a “structural intervention” by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska, could be a metaphor for the current state of the art market – it’s down but definitely not out.

During the 2006-2008 art boom, feverish bidding – and speculation – drove prices to breathtaking levels as hedge-fund billionaires, Russian tycoons and Middle Eastern princes battled for the top works of art. Records tumbled in the salerooms: Lucian Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping” (1995) at $33.6m (£20.76m); Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Flower – Magenta” (1995-2000) at £13m ($20.7m); Takashi Murakami’s sculpture “My Lonesome Cowboy” (1998) at £9m. A single sale of contemporary art made $363m in New York in May 2008. Art galleries had long waiting lists of customers for new work from the hottest artists, and shows were often sold out before the works had left the studio.