Naked people climb out of the earth and run around waving their arms and screaming, while someone with a bird’s head and wings plays the bagpipes. It’s my favourite artwork at this year’s Frieze but don’t go looking for this wildly imaginative outrage among the heaps of contemporary art at Frieze London. It’s a painting by a 16th-century follower of Hieronymus Bosch and is on view at Frieze Masters, the posher tent on the other side of Regent’s Park.
I’m sorry to say I was bored rigid in Frieze London. Many people attend, I imagine, hoping to be informed and excited by the newest, coolest art, but you’ll see more genuinely avant garde wonders in the Bake Off tent. There are endless paintings, none of which are much good, interspersed with photographs which tend to be a little better.
The first thing here that held me at all was a two-metre-tall, inkjet print by Wolfgang Tillmans called Paul, nude, golf ball in which the naked Paul has his elbows on the floor and his close-cropped head bowed between them in apparent despair, while the white ball beside him eerily mirrors the pale flesh of his bony back. But it’s not new – it dates from 1994. And, oh Lord, those paintings.
There seem to be millions of them. And an elegant white marquee full of gallery booths along endless white corridors is a ghastly way of showing them, a dreadful way of seeing. It’s not as rewarding as visiting galleries which can be interesting spaces.
Here, everything is crammed in, like a huge shop – the Selfridges of art. Frieze, it is claimed, defines the new and finds the stars of tomorrow. But it’s obvious that it really serves the needs of sellers and the tastes of a certain kind of extremely wealthy consumer.
This is most apparent on VIP day when I enter along with a host of tech bros, hedge-fund managers, retired hedge-fund managers, their children, and – is that George Osborne? – who were actually here to buy this stuff. At Frieze Masters, I was about to ask the price of an Anselm Kiefer work, matted vegetation clogging its surface, when an elderly couple beat me to it. They were genuinely interested in purchasing.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
