The day before we took off for a weekend in Italy, I went to the Frieze Fair. It is huge modern art show in a gigantic tent (or, more accurately, series of tents) in Regent’s Park (originally appropriated by Henry VIII to be his hunting ground). There is actually a companion show, Frieze Masters, in another monster tent in a different part of the park. I only went to one, partly because the admission was so expensive (£35 for one show and around £55 for both). There was a sculpture garden in the park that was free. Frieze Masters does not limit itself to new works and has stuff going back to antiquity. Everything at both events is for sale, at least theoretically. But at the one I was at, the art was “on sale” only if you wanted to spend thousands and thousands of pounds on works that were generally large and often strange.

The whole thing reminded me of a cross between the Whitney Biennial and the SOFA shows at the Park Avenue Armory we used to attend. Just a mix of glorious and beautiful art and pieces that you look at and think “Really? What were they thinking?” I’ll include a few photos at the end of this post to give you an idea of the show, although it was so incredibly varied that I’m not sure I can do it justice. Watching the mix of outrageously dressed art types and clearly wealthy collectors was part of the fun as well. It was set up by spaces rented to galleries (like SOFA), so the whole thing wasn’t exactly curated, since what you saw was ultimately dependent on what the galleries chose to present, which presumably was dependent on what they thought would sell. Most seemed to go for flamboyant.

As is often the case when I go to these sorts of things, I wander around wondering how is it that these particular artists and their works were chosen. Why them and not Tom Nussbaum or Karen Fried, for example? Some of the works are done by people who are obviously talented. But many are works where, I am convinced, it was the artist’s rap about his or her work, and his or her self-confidence and self-promotional ability that makes the difference. The Art World is a mystery to me, I guess. There was a lot of money sloshing around there, looking for something to buy. It was a fun day and I got to speak with a fair number of artists and gallery reps. The place was a madhouse and I went on a Thursday. It must have been wall to wall people on the weekend.

One of my other takeaways from my day looking at incredibly varied art was that I need to try to be freer in what I do. I feel like I have been timid so far, painting between the lines too often. The works I was most drawn to were frequently the ones that seemed to have been dashed off quickly. They may not have been and the look was undoubtedly the result of years of practice.

On the way home, I stopped in Clerkenwell to attend the gallery opening of a collage artist from Bloomfield, NJ, who I met through Judie’s Montclair meditation teacher. His work was interesting and there were a few I suppose I would have considered buying if their price was right and I was at home. (His stuff was too small in scale for a place like the Frieze.) But again, I was thinking as I walked around, “These are nice, but the people in my Art and Soul covenant group do things that are just as nice.” The gallery was in a wonderful little part of Clerkenwell that we didn’t see when were looking for flats. Maybe it is out of our price range.

Frieze photos follow: