The Coolest Works at Frieze

The art market is coming back strong, reports Anthony Haden-Guest, if sales at London’s largest contemporary art fair and Sotheby’s are any indication. VIEW OUR GALLERY.

The elephant in the room when London’s Frieze Week opened was just what the fair would indicate of the state of the art economy. Answers came in pronto. “We sold 90 percent of our booth in the first two hours,” says Carol Greene of the New York gallery, Greene Naftali. Kenny Schachter, the London-based American dealer, was in Rove, his gallery in Hoxton Square. He floated a hand over a black-and-white cube by the designer Richard Woods. “Aby Rosen and the Mugrabis just bought ten pieces” he said.

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So things were going okay?

“Things have come back. They’ve never been better. I sold a piece for $10 million this morning.”

A piece?

“A Monet.” Pause. “You do what you gotta do.”

Well, Greene seemed gung-ho and Schachter is a straight-shooters so, even allowing for the more nuanced optimism I heard in some quarters, things were certainly on the mend. So I could stop number-crunching and focus on the inner life of the fair, including the promotional hoopla, and, of course, the art.

• Art Beast: The Best of Art, Photography, and DesignThe art first. The bust of 1990 created great change and this one is clearly doing the same. There was less fairground art, meaning huge in-your-face installations, slapped together with bags of post-adolescent macho in the manner of the Chapmans or Paul McCarthy. Jane England, whose Westbourne Grove gallery, England & Co., [LINK: http://www.englandgallery.com/] was over in Zoo, said, “There’s less bling. It’s much less vulgar.”

Gavin Brown’s stand had several pieces by Rirkrit Tiravanija, seven double pages of the New York Times, one for each day of the week, apparently chosen for the gloom of their contents upon each of which the artist has written THE DAYS OF THIS SOCIETY IS NUMBERED. By the end of the fair collectors, clearly more optimistic than the artist, had bought “more than one but not all,” in the words of the woman running the stand, at $90,000 each.

The Paris gallery Frank Elbaz was dedicated to Wallace Berman, a Los Angeles artist of the 1950s and ‘60s, who has always been identified with the Beat movement. “There is this California spirit in London right now,” Elbaz said buoyantly, pointing out that John Baldessari was showing at the Tate Modern and Ed Ruscha at the Hayward. Such are the external forces that create a sale. At any rate, Elbaz had sold several.

Elmgreen & Dragset, flavours of the moment after the Biennale, as they have been ever since their success in Venice when they turned the Danish and Nordic Pavilions into darkly funny installations, the supposed houses of two gay collectors. Humor is extremely rare in American art, but not uncommon among Europeans, and the Elmgreen & Dragset at the Madrid gallery, Helga de Alvear, is a replica of a large Giacometti walking figure. It is entitled Homme Qui Ne Marche Pas and attached to one leg is a large white ball and chain. (Helga de Alvear told me that it was sold to “a Spanish Institution” for 55,000 euros.) Some stands were willfully eccentric. The Milanese gallery Zero was showing just one piece by a Rumanian artist, Victor Man. “That was the artist’s decision,” said the gallery girl, who was sitting on a table in the corner. (They sold it for 30,000 euros.) “I hope to sell other works” she said, and returned to leafing through her books of transparencies.