It could be argued that “Frieze week”, the seven days of frenetic activity around London’s premier art fair, now one of the mainstays of the cultural calendar, has never taken place at a less opportune moment. The world’s financial system is in meltdown, critics will say, and here we are fine-tuning our fiddles among the conceptual jokes and playful surrealism of the contemporary art scene.

The danger is that it will all feel a little, well, decadent. We are used to the idea that art should say something important and weighty about the world in which it is produced. But what do the pranksters and posers of today’s jet-fuelled scene tell us about the credit crunch and its grim implications?