Prospect at the Frieze

It was virtually impossible to find a hotel room in London last week, much less a brutalist closet in a designer boutique. Black turtlenecks, WAGs, Russians and BMW courtesy cars were scaring the wildlife in Regent’s Park, temporary home to the fifth Frieze Art fair. Over 70,000 ordinary people paid £18 to struggle though the turnstiles of this multi-ringed circus. Inside, more than 150 galleries hawked good, bad and ordinary contemporary art at extraordinary prices.

To a postmodern situationist, the coming together of art and money in an agape of pretentiousness was its own justification. While Frieze has unquestionably established London’s credentials at the apex of the contemporary art market, it was frankly difficult to view the concatenation of (very) mixed media in anything approaching an objective light – or at all, for that matter. Not since I stood on the Leeds Utd terraces in the 1970s with someone pissing in my pocket have I felt so uncomfortable in a crowd. Frieze made me wonder about the difference between Pop Art and today’s version. British pioneers such as Jeff Nuttall, author of Bomb Culture, who painted motorway bridges in rainbow colours, inflated giant pigs and installed copulating couples on boating lakes for the sheer hell of it would have made seven colours of a fortune doing the same for London folk in today’s market or kicked them senseless in disgust. Marcel Duchamps showed urinals in 1917. Call me old fashioned but I’d back the absinthed Dadaists against the ketamined Hoxton, Soho (or SoHo) mafia any day. Taking a cheap shot would be too easy, even after my half-eaten sushi, perilously balanced on the edge of a turquoise lacquered table at a Japanese stand was sold to an excitable Italian fashionista for the price of my house, so I’ll stay positive and truth to tell, there was plenty to be positive about. Frieze was a Happening, People were basking in cool. Here in Britain we know how to bamboozle Johnny tourist. Four glorious days where a reputed £180m was given by the undeserving rich to gallery owners who, in turn, gave up to half that amount to artists most of us have never heard of and won’t be the poorer for that pleasure, is cause for global celebration. It was fun to see how inventive young (and older) artists had been, transforming everyday household objects into captivating piles of money, overseen by scowling hucksters with unbridled contempt for the poor and huddled masses who’d just come to look at the art – it had to be there somewhere.

I don’t have a problem with the fact that the crowds bore testament to the way that art has descended into fashion: it beats bullfighting or Latter Day mass suicide cults, but the Ideal Homes exhibition format meant it was difficult to muse, arch the eyebrows, strike an intellectual pose and stroke the imaginary beard as required when viewing high art. I glimpsed some interesting pieces – the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who has spent a lot of time in mental institutions, thrilled us with an installation of red Spiderman fingers. I was captivated by a French mannequin boy/man with saucepan lid breasts and a red illuminated light bulb for a willy. You don't find many like that up North. I stood a little too long admiring Evan Penny's model of the back of a bald bloke's head and somebody almost bought me. Dirk Skreber’s ‘Untitled’ – a magic-realism depiction of a chocolate box cottage with a large satellite dish on the roof – sold for an amusing $250,000. Sam Taylor-Wood’s ‘That White Rush,' a sort-of video of Leda and the Swan, was reprised at the White Cube stand. Those pervy pre-Raphaelites were only interested in depicting barely pubescent girls doing unspeakable stuff and putting it down to alluding to classical myth. We photograph real swans and real teens nowadays and call it post-ironic. Those cheeky Chapman Brothers got me thinking with their statue of bloodstained twin kids, joined at the ear. They got me thinking they should be locked up, but anger is OK, isn’t it?

The fact that I’m still thinking a lot about Frieze shows that it was a valid and important event. I’ll go next year if they let me in, but frankly, I needed a good lie down after all the excitement. So did the wonderful glamour girl who comprised half of Richard Prince’s ‘Muscle Car’ exhibit, a revolving orange 1970s Dodge Charger displayed in the fashion of a car show. We met outside by accident. I told her that the work lost a lot of its meaning without her curves, black bra, boots and red lipstick underwriting the paean to onanistic sex and death (see left). ‘I hate that car’ she said. ‘Have you got a cigarette?’ Unfashionably, I’d given up. She found someone with a turtleneck who hadn’t. So it goes…