Curated Booths
If the Frieze Projects were meant to critique aspects of the fair, the criticism they offered was tired and ineffectual, lacking bite or sufficient complexity. A more potent critique came out of the curating done in the booths themselves. Strongest of all was at the Fair Gallery, where three independent dealers—gb agency of Paris, Jan Mot of Brussels, and Raster of Warsaw—had banded together to share a booth and asked independent curator Aurelie Voltz to shape the exhibition.

Voltz faced some constraints—she was asked to choose among artists represented by the galleries, and from them, works that were for sale, and to design her show within the boundaries of the booth—which she called her “frame.” Otherwise she was given, in her words, “carte blanche.”

Voltz’s installation offers formal rather than conceptual critique. She shifted attention from the walls, where works are typically displayed, to the center of the space with her arrangement of the artworks, including a prominent floor installation by Pierre Bismuth. And three display tables by Rafal Bujnowski, arranged at the corner of the booth that opened to the pedestrian corridor, created a sort of barrier to entry that is antithetical to the intention of most galleries present.

But of course the Fair Gallery does have the same intentions as all the others. They were there to sell. And they had so far. A work by Kathrin Sonntag, the one artist not represented by one of the three collaborating galleries (“the exception to the rule is also important,” Voltz said) went to a private collector from Ireland. Two works by Deimantas Narkevicius had also sold, including Never Backward, a wooden crib filled with paraffin, which went to the Tate Modern. (The work was also the site of a recurrent performance piece, in which artist Roman Ondak had asked a young mother to teach her baby to walk in the fair.)

Voltz admitted that the galleries had banded together to create the Fair Gallery in part for financial reasons, but she said that they also each had a curatorial spirit. She praised Frieze for waving its requirement that a gallery be in existence for two years to participate and said the Fair Gallery planned to continue its project in subsequent fairs, but with rotating curators.

Following Suit
Though less daring than the Fair Gallery’s experiment, a few other galleries sought to escape the white-cube gallery feel with booth designs that were playful and colorful. Lehmann Maupin had a floor decorated with anime figures by the artist Mr., while Galeria Pepe Cobo of Madrid decorated its floors and walls with AstroTurf. Gavin Brown poked fun at the idea of the market by turning his booth into a flea market offering remote controls signed by Tony Oursler, vintage clothing by Jane Holzer, travel books by Clarissa Dalrymple, and other assorted bric-a-brac linked to big names. Galleria Massimo de Carlo of Milan had a colorful decorative wall by John Armleder.

Baser Instincts
But there was one Frieze Project that outshone all the others, and many of the booths: Richard Prince’s souped-up mustard-and-black Dodge muscle car, festooned with a busty girl (who carried a rag to keep the car buffed but seemed more interested in posing for pictures) and a soundtrack that mixed rock beats and a voiceover reading of crude one-liners (taken directly from the artist’s “Joke” paintings). Spinning slowly on a shiny dais, the work practically begged you to get over your higher instincts and just enjoy the baser temptations of speed, sex, and glam.

Prince is very much a star in New York these days, where his Guggenheim show is drawing raves, and between his Frieze project and several works for sale he’s no less popular in London right now, completing a generation-long change from Bad Boy to It Boy. But has the artist changed, or just the perception of his work? If he was once seen as a rebel challenging aesthetic and cultural values, now he’s more rightly understood as a great accommodator, unfazed by distinctions between high and low, heady and base impulses, aesthetic and carnal desire. And it is precisely his willingness to forego judgment and elitism that makes him so much the man of this particular moment—when the art world, if it were really forced to examine itself in the mirror, would feel a good deal of shame.