The bottom might have dropped out of the top end of the art market, but Britain’s famously satirical contemporary artists were putting a brave face on matters at Tuesday’s opening of this year’s London Art Fair.

Perhaps the most impudent work on offer was by Carrie Reichardt, whose ceramic aerosol spray-can “Just My Fucking Luck Capitalism Collapses Just As My Work Hits The Art Market”, priced at £400 ($581), summed up what many artists are feeling as the economic downturn takes its toll on potential collectors.