LONDON— Frieze Projects, the curatorial program organized this year by Neville Wakefield, seems to have set itself a rather paradoxical task. On the one hand, the presence of works that are chosen by a curator and are not for sale is meant to lend prestige to an institution—the art fair—that critic Dave Hickey, in a lecture today, called “the embodiment of the [art world’s] current moment” and the epitome of “absolute raw rapacious capitalism.” On the other hand, the commissioned works, according to the fair’s promotional materials, are meant to “respond to the social and economic dynamics of the fair”—in other words, to offer critique of some sort.

So how do you simultaneously promote and criticize the same thing? Unfortunately, if there is an answer to this riddle, Frieze Projects failed to find it. Generally modest in scale and conception, the curated pieces were mostly easy to miss or simply overlook. And the most successful works simply forwent criticism for a clever reframing of the question.

Lara Favaretto, who had invited the Queen of England to attend the fair, displayed the resulting personalized rejection letter by Sir Robin Janvrin, the now-retired private secretary to the Queen, on a twiggy tree that was surrounded by a series of benches in one of the fair’s main pedestrian corridors. The idea here is that the rumor of the queen’s attendance is enough to cause a stir and get people talking and fantasizing; the more sober reality is that for fairgoers on their feet all day, celebrities are not objects of desire, but benches are.

Gianni Motti dressed a man as a Metropolitan policeman and had him practice yoga on the exhibition floor. The work is supposed to cause us to question institutions of authority and issues of security. Unfortunately, it works better as evidence of how in the West, yoga has been transformed from spiritual practice into a kind of callisthenics for sophisticates.

Elin Hansdottir distilled the white light used to display art into its component colors of green, red, and blue—which added some welcome color to a space cast mostly in black and white. But the work was unfortunately placed in the fair’s entrance hall, where it was lost among visitor amenities like the coat check, VIP registration, and press room.

And Kris Martin’s 4 p.m moment of silence at Wednesday’s professional preview probably provoked less contemplation than whispers, and otherwise registered as little more than a prolonged inverted hiccup.

A Few Successes
The market may be a devil, but it is certainly less an enemy of contemplation and meaningful engagement with art than half-baked ideas and unwieldy execution are. That’s one lesson to draw from the Frieze Commissions. Another is that institutional critique is tough. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most successful Frieze commissions offered less direct criticism of the culture of the fair than insight into how better to enjoy it.

Janice Kerbel’s Remarkable reminded us that if fairs are often compared to marketplaces, an equally relevant historic precedent is the carnival or travelling circus. Throughout the tent, her witty posters announced a series of contemporary showmen and freaks—from the Shyest Person Alive to Faint Girl, a “Heroine of sincerest and most infallible compassion,” who “swoon[s] in the face of any untruth.”

The idea of relating the fair to festivals of yore was taken a step further in the space set up by the Frankfurter Kunstverein. A makeshift theater designed by Tobias Putrih and built out of cardboard, wood, and scaffolding became the site of a series of interactive entertainments. On Thursday, a tarot card reader, a country singer, and a magician shared the stage—and shifted position by 90 degrees every few minutes as an alarm went off. On Friday, the philosopher Dr. Peter Cave, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, lectured on absurdity and the meaning of life alongside a woman in a black bunny suit, and a Dalek, the villainous robot-like extraterrestrial from the British science fiction television show Doctor Who.

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.

Designing this mirror, however, is not what Prince is about. Instead he has a more manageable goal—a kind of nonreflective shine. When faced with the spectacle of Frieze, you can either call for a moment of silence or choose to show the shiniest sexiest thing in the entire tent. Prince sees the great potential of the latter. Following the Hickey talk, the critic Matthew Collings told me that “the shadow of the current moment is a desire for aesthetic guidance.” For those scared of shadows, Prince is a comforting light.