Frieze: Opening Impressions

LONDON—Nervous rumblings that the art market has caught the willies because of isolated upsets in the financial markets certainly didn’t affect the mood during the opening hours of the five-year-old Frieze Art Fair.

Spirits were high as a high-roller list of VIP heavyweights—from market-maker Charles Saatchi to New York hedgie Steven Tannenbaum and fashion icon Tom Ford—wandered the aisles in the first tranche of exclusive admissions.

“We opened a Kusama show last night,” said Glenn Scott Wright of London’s Victoria Miro Gallery, “and there was a feeding frenzy around the work. We could have sold the show out over and over at prices between $150,000 and $600,000.”

“Everyone’s thinking,” continued Wright, “that this week is the big art market test because of the banking and housing market crises, but it feels very buoyant.”

The dealer said sales were brisk in the opening hour of the fair, with works by Grayson Perry, Chantal Joffe, and Idris Kahn selling at prices ranging from $15,000 to $100,000.

Perry’s extraordinary monkish mountaineer figure in cast iron and paint, Our Father (2007), had already sold three out of an edition of five at £58,000 a piece, and the fourth was on reserve.

Similar optimism was heard at the combined stand of stand of the New York/London/Los Angeles Gagosian galleries, where works by a roster of big name stars hung in tight formation without a single wall label identifying them.

“The fair has already been fantastic,” says Stefan Ratibor, director at Gagosian London. He ticked off a long list of artists—including Cecily Brown, Tracey Emin, Tom Friedman, Franz West, Richard Serra, Georg Baselitz, and Edward Ruscha—with works at prices ranging from “very little to around $800,000.”

Collectors also appeared calm, unruffled by a gauntlet of media headlines about the imminent end of the art market bubble.

“It’s not crowded and it’s not nuts here,” said Dallas super-collector Howard Rachofsky as he admired the Wayne Gonzales painting Cheering Crowd, which had already sold at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery for £15,000. “The land grab [for art real estate] always goes on, but I like the pace of it here. I can actually enjoy myself.”

Other observers weren’t so sure.

“I’m not that excited,” says Matthew Armstrong, the New York art advisor and curator for Donald Marron’s Lightyear Capital. “Maybe it’s because I go to the galleries too much and I’m jaded, but there’s nothing great here. It’s a terrific distillation of what we see in Chelsea. I don’t know what to think.”

Armstrong was standing on the turf of New York’s Barbara Gladstone Gallery, staring at Richard Prince’s Sideshow, a platinum, silicone, and stainless-steel sculpture of a kneeling nude woman encased in a tire-shaped Plexiglas vitrine. So far, according to a source unconnected to the gallery, one of the works from an edition of two plus an artist proof had each sold in the mid-six-figure range.

Prince is enjoying mostly gung-ho reviews for his Guggenheim retrospective and he seemed to be all over the white-tented confines of Frieze with joke paintings and muscle-car hoods. A major attraction was his special Frieze public sculpture of a modified circa-1970 Dodge Challenger muscle car in tangerine and black set on a revolving stage, just like at industry car shows. A buxom model clad in a bikini top, denim short-shorts, and high boots was part of the high-performance installation, rubbing the car every so often with a chamois cloth. A voiceover with Prince’s dulcet tones tells jokes in a kind of off-color monologue.

For those wishing for a “crash,” the best work to see is The Deluge, a mural-size work by glitzy fashion photographer David LaChapelle at Cologne/Berlin’s Jablonka Galerie. Elaborately staged and shot in his huge L.A. studio, complete with gushing water, the photo shows a large cast of young and old nude figures trying to battle the raging waters in an apocalyptic scene of downed telephone lines and crashed signs for Gucci, Burger King, and Caesars Palace. The work was produced in an edition of five, three of which had already sold at $175,000 a piece.

That highlight image came to mind as I exited the fair later in the afternoon and saw a helicopter buzzing over the tree tops of Regent’s Park, dragging a huge banner that read: “Pop Art: Is: Gagosian,” a “flighty” promotion for the huge exhibition “Pop Art Is” at the dealer’s King’s Cross gallery.

It looks like there’s still some champagne left in the bottle.