Red faced at Frieze

What a hang over and I wasn't even drinking. Last week there was Frieze, the Regent’s Park contemporary fair launched in Regent’s Park in  2003 and now a world famous destination and not far away its new sibling--Frieze Masters showing painting, sculpture and works on paper with a pre2000 dateline. Across town, and overlapping with the Friezes, was the sixth edition of the design and art fair PAD  in leafy Berkeley Square.

 What with the contemporary art auctions, gallery openings and launches of new spaces as well as parties some nights four or five of them, art lovers are now catching up on sleep. I enjoy the memories--many of them recollections of art that moved me--Josef Koudelka's photographs above all--one of which is how hot my cheeks got when this viewer and the art on view couldn't have been more of  a mismatch.

      Frieze London (as the contemporary fair has been rebranded since May's successful launch of Frieze New York on Randall's Island) is not my natural habitat. However I went along last Saturday, chiefly to see an old friend in from Berlin. I had skipped the last few editions of the fair ("keeping up" had diminishing returns) and was surprised to find it looking more like a display of art as I know it rather than the emptied contents of a bag ladies stash. Outstanding was the booth of the Tokyo's Taka Ishii Gallery showing photographs by Yuki Kimura.  The place was as crowded as Oxford Street at Christmas; hot and airless. I got thirsty fast, Good luck, I thought, when I saw the wheeled trolley in an aisle outside a gallery. On it was a stacked of paper cups (advertising TATE.in white dots against sky blue), sugar packets and wooden sticks for stirrers. Coffee was sure to be in a spigot at the side. I picked up a cup but before I could pour a man suddenly materialized: “Do not touch the art,” he said severely. I blushed and laughed. As I was in need of refreshment rather than a concept I left that tent and headed for Frieze Masters a twenty minute walk through the park.   

 There at least one visitor was as out of synch with the art on view as I had been at Frieze London.

   The Pace Gallery stand displayed an Alexander Calder mobile. A man came up to have a look. One of the staff chatted with him, explaining that Calder was the first to invent the mobile. The fellow looked puzzled. He turned his gaze from her and stared at the phone in his hand. 

    I heard the above anecdote from a trustworthy source who heard it from someone at Pace. When I tried to confirm at the gallery, I heard only, "I don't know anything about it," Well at least my mistaking coffee cups for art is not an apocryphal tale. And I think thinking that Calder invented the mobile phone isn't one either.

  As for Frieze Masters about which I'm blogging at Prospero at economist.com tomorrow, it survived the huge publicity blitz and the theorizing which put me off when I was first subjected to it. (see previous post.) It joins TEFAF in March as a fair I won't want to miss.