The art fair is a strange phenomenon, a drama of exposure and concealment. It lays bare the commercial machinery of the art world for the paying punter—this year’s Frieze London and Masters were £92 for the weekend or £250 for an early preview—but much of the selling happens before the doors are opened to non-vips, by which point the gallerists are more beleaguered tour guides than sales representatives. Meanwhile, the presence of bankrolling corporations is both advertised (see the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounges for high-net-worth collectors and banking clients) and obscured (see the mirrors tastefully inscribed with the phrase Deutsche Bank: Reflections of Commitment). At first sight, the layout—with its gridded maze of booths around tables in the middle where gallery staff sit nursing coffee and rapidly emailing—recalls a kind of upmarket country show. And yet there is a euphemistic, abstract quality to it all. Walking around the cavernous tent in Regent’s Park, glowing headachingly white (lighting a small booth for the weekend costs galleries £5,000 on top of the £25,000 rent), it begins to feel like being inside a website.
Frieze is for the most part a terrible place to see art, but a good place to glimpse the money that greases its wheels. Frieze Masters, dedicated to art made before 2000 and held in a nearby tent with dark blue walls, plusher carpet and relatively subdued lighting, is its more refined sister, where Roman statue fragments, minor works by Old Masters and Shakespeare quartos sell to cultural institutions and lone millionaires. The main tent represents run-of-the-mill, airport terminal-style affluence: the champagne carts, over-priced sandwiches and stacks of complimentary copies of the Financial Times all make for an atmosphere of luxury without grandeur. Once the vips have cleared out, the demographic skews towards sexagenarians in colourful, thick-framed glasses, the understated, black T-shirted nouveau riche, and the heavily Botoxed sporting Balenciaga tote bags. For all Frieze’s emphasis on emerging and ‘rediscovered’ artists, an art fair cannot but feel like a home interiors market. The mini-white-cube format, which alludes to how the works would look in a bright, airy penthouse hallway, is partly responsible for this, but mainly it’s the largely bland and inoffensive work on display. Margins are tight for many galleries, and costs are only rising (typically, a smaller gallery needs to sell around £60,000 worth of art just to break even). This year’s offerings felt cagily unimaginative: sticking for the most part to large-format figuration, derivative abstraction and the occasional ostentatious sculpture.
An art fair is not a biennial, of course, and has neither an overarching editorial vision nor an obligation to ‘explore themes’ or ‘speak to the moment’. Over the last few years, however, Frieze has started to feel progressively less modern, as if it were regressing back into the long 2010s. This year, there was little that felt truly contemporary, even though many of the artworks were made in the past twelve months. Digital aesthetics were for the most part avoided, though there was some reckoning with the visual language of ai—a series of oil paintings by Amitesh Shrivastava recalled the feathery green-brown hallucinations of early Dall-E outputs; Jon Rafman showed an inkjet print of a dog and a girl with the lopsided, haunted look of computer-coagulated faces. Meanwhile, the mass of middling painting was still metabolizing the post-2008 fashion for bold pastiche and brash abstraction, and the compositional impact of phone photography (rigid lines, reflexive gaze, flattened colour and light). The iPhone itself was also present, in a painting by Patrizio di Massimo of a woman in a living room straight out of a made.com advertisement scrolling and ignoring her daughter behind her, and a discomfiting portrait by Emil Sands of a bronzed, bony prepubescent girl in a bikini walking on a beach, again, looking at her phone.
As if in resistance to the digital, though, there was an almost overwhelming amount of figurative work, much of it blurred into agreeable abstraction. References to 20th-century masters were on the nose. A number of galleries showed collections of small-scale still lifes—sketches of apples; pastel drawings of vases; oil paintings of lit candles—all pretty and all similar to one other, like an exhibit of an artist’s minor early works, or, less generously, market stall fare. If the real world was gestured to, it was largely in etiolated ways. At London-based Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, Delaine Le Bas staged a generic, contextless protest: the walls were draped in calico and placards with slogans like ‘No state control / Know state control’, while smocked actors roamed around reading lines such as ‘What sort of world are we living in?’ This objectless display, in the midst of Frieze’s corporate maze, was entertainingly brazen in its vacuity, inevitably recalling in neutered form the real protests at last year’s Frieze la over Deutsche Bank’s ties to Israel and its loans to real estate companies that resell stolen properties in the West Bank.footnote1 There was one small genuine gesture of defiance this year: the Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria boycotted her scheduled performance on the Thursday, citing the genocides taking place in Gaza and elsewhere, though the ripple this made was minimal, and the crowd swallowed up the empty space as soon as her announcement ended.
Most of the best work was in the Focus section, reserved for newer galleries. At London-based Ginny on Frederick, Alex Margo Arden’s sculpture composed of decommissioned museum mannequins had real power, both visceral (owing to the raw heft of the sculpted bodies) and haunting (in that they were cracked, faded and, like petrified bodies from Pompeii, frozen in a moment of thwarted action). At Beirut-based Marfa’, Omar Fakhoury showed small-format paintings on unframed, unstretched canvas of an arresting set of images—two people with lizard heads, naked save for shiny red boots, having sex on the grass; a tongue cut in half with scissors; a donkey shooting urine out of its eyes; a butterfly boiled in a cauldron—which spoke a familiar language of nightmare and myth but felt novel. It was shrewd to situate this section in prime position at the fair’s entrance: these booths were fresher, played more with form and seemed more like mini-exhibitions than art shops. 
However devoid of ideas and extortionate for smaller galleries, fairs are indispensable competitors with auction houses in the broader art world’s financial ecosystem. Since its founding in 2003, Frieze has become the centrepiece of the uk’s calendar, and as the uk is anxious to defend its second-highest share of the global art market (which has shrunk to 18 per cent, according to a report by Basel this year, representing less than half of the us share, but more than all the eu countries put together), it is important for galleries to make sales here that reaffirm London’s status as a major power player.footnote2 One typical press release from the fair insisted: ‘Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2025 have reinforced London’s position as a cultural capital and a vital centre for the art market’. This mode of anxious defence is not particular to the uk—nearly every headline about healthy sales figures at fairs over the past year includes the phrase ‘in spite of’—but, relative to its American and European counterparts, London does have something to prove. It hosts no biennial, and to Paris’s Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Musée d’Art Moderne, Bourse de Commerce, Fondation Cartier and Fondation Louis Vuitton, it has only the comparatively quaint duo of Tates. In recent years, its galleries have also complained at the abolition of ‘non-dom’ status for collectors, as well as new measures introduced to restrict the art world’s ability to operate as a money laundrette.footnote3
When Frieze began, the British art world was still high off the fumes of the Young British Artists’ unprecedented commercial success. Some of those artists––having won over the market as well as art institutions––were by then celebrities, and collectors were eager for a piece of them. Now, with that bubble long burst, and the market increasingly wary, Frieze doesn’t only reflect the most saleable portion of what gets made—the demands of the fair format also inevitably guide what artists make in the first place. In this sense, we could see it as a closed loop, a dance of supply and demand that resolves itself beyond the purview of most people who care about art. Following the money, however, can tell us something about how the art business conceives of its future. Basel’s report stated that art sales have dropped by 12 per cent globally since 2024. The figure has been falling since its peak at $68.2 billion in 2014, although the wealth of billionaires has more than doubled in the same period. The report put this down mostly to ‘geopolitical tensions, trade wars and economic volatility’. Its author, Clare McAndrew, suggested the rational response to this is for the art market to expand internationally: ‘The growth has to come with expanding the realm of interest’.