London's Guerrilla Art

George Clooney, Damien Hirst, and Charles Saatchi turn out for a controversial exhibit—including a crucified ape—as the Frieze Art Fair begins. VIEW OUR GALLERY.

With more tiers than a wedding cake, Wednesday’s VIP and VVIP previews for the Frieze Art Fair took place. Meaning that hedge-funders, film stars, and the odd stray supermodel were meandering around London’s Regent’s Park. But that Kevin Spacey, Damien Hirst, and even George Clooney should be at a satellite show just over the road in an 18th-century church was strange. By dusk, 1,400 people had gone through the doors to see The Age of the Marvellous and the works that its Wunderkammer ("cabinet of curiosities") houses.

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• Art Beast: The Best of Art, Photography, and DesignFryer might be vulnerable to the charge of sacrilege but his work is already in the collection of French billionaire Francois Pinault. Morgan, too, already has her fair share of fashionable fans (collectors include Kate Moss) but when Departures sold yesterday, it went for around £100,000—three times what her pieces usually sell for. Around these works are pieces by Alastair Mackie who, with Morgan (who only taxidermies animals that die of natural causes) and Fryer, shares a strong eco-aware streak. His Sphere is a perfect round structure made of tiny delicate mouse skulls.

The Age of the Marvellous is curated by London-based American Joseph LaPlaca. His touchstone is E.O. Wilson, the molecular biologist whose 1998 book Consilience argued for art and science as intimately related. Also key is his wish to return to the idea of a gallery as a collection of wonders instead of a freak show. “P.T. Barnum, who of course ran the world’s most famous circus, had a sense of a museum as a place of shock and horror” he says. “That idea was very important to the YBAs [Young British Artists]. I wanted to get away from that, back to a sense of a collection as the sum of all of man’s knowledge—a cause for wonder and awe." The “marvellous,” then, can be scientific, religious, or philosophical. Alyson Shotz’s Ice Network makes a slender breakable sculpture out of the molecular pattern of ice. Martin Sexton’s film of the moon waxing and waning, casting shadows over the face of Socrates, sounds ridiculous, but is hauntingly lovely. The oldest known composition plays. The carpe diem sentiment of the lyrics takes on an extra moving dimension learning that the philosopher’s face is actually made from a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite.

It’s perhaps at this point (using a meteorite as raw material?) that you might start to "marvel" at the production costs of these works. The scope and ambition comes down to big backing as well as big ideas. LaPlaca’s business partner at his art "producing" company AVA is Mike Platt, co-founder of the BlueCrest hedge fund. Since 2008, they’ve commissioned new works, hoping to build a leading collection. That’s the marvelous fact that explains why the Marvellists are being given the freedom to cast insects in amber (as in Alastair Mackie’s chess set) and make apes with the help of the team from Madame Tussaud’s. In an unusual move, LaPlaca and Platt have applied a movie-producing mentality to the old artist/patron relationship.