Everything has turned upside down in Regent’s Park. The two Frieze art fairs that take place here in October have changed places. All the danger, outrage and obscenity you might hope to find among the up-to-the-minute contemporary galleries at Frieze London have migrated to Frieze Masters. It is an unholy joy while its supposedly cutting-edge sibling has aged into a crashing bore. It’s coming to something when two pumpkins are the most outrageous spectacle at Frieze London. People congregate around them as if desperately seeking that famous Frieze vibe of the insouciantly daring. “Pose with the pumpkins!” a photographer is saying – and many people will want to be snapped with Anthea Hamilton’s sculptures. Bold, orange, funny and meaningless, they dominate a show created by Hamilton at Thomas Dane Gallery’s stand. But the main reason they stand out is that a couple of pumpkins will do that in a sea of paintings.
I thought I loved looking at paint. But Frieze London puts that addiction to the test, an aversion therapy. There seem to be more canvases than in the National Gallery. You walk in and immediately see a spread of abstract starbursts by Jadé Fadojutimi in the prestige site occupied by Gagosian. She doesn’t hold it. Her paintings boom and crash with colour yet they don’t stop zinging long enough to let you sink into them. And there are paintings to the left of her, paintings to the right. Whichever path you take through the labyrinth of booths, you will come across every kind of painterly commodity: pictures of people, pictures of dogs, even a picture of the Muppets riding bikes through a park by Keith Mayerson.
It’s natural to like this comedy highlight. Confronted with so much oil and acrylic, of course it’s tempting to alight on the most grabby, instantly impactful, in short Friezesque. Yet there are not many laughs in this big, bland tent. Instead, this year’s fair feels like the hungover aftermath of decades of art world excess.
When the first Frieze art fair was staged in 2003, sensationalist, provocative art was the toast of the times – and painting was supposedly as dead as a doornail. Now taste has traumatically inverted, like a glove turned inward to hide the filth on it. Painting is not dead but urgent! Important! And radical! Sleazy, shocking art has been replaced by a moral drive to do right by society. But if you really want to help, wouldn’t a charitable or political donation be more effective than hanging a political painting in your penthouse?
This art is all for sale, mostly for eye-watering prices. Whose taste does it reflect? Not mine because I am not here to buy. As Frieze London vomits up everything that was previously fashionable and goes for a purgative cure of Passionate Painting, thus proving Robert Hughes was right to diagnose the cycles of the art world as “bulimic”, you can see with depressing clarity that Frieze really is the art festival of the fashion-mad 1%. And their cultural influence trickles down to the rest of us.
If I was rich I’d want paintings, too. But the paintings here look like they were done by the truckload to fulfil a sudden market shift. Painting, it turns out, can be just as superficial and silly as any other medium – after all it is literally all on the surface. There are so many stupid, boring and banal paintings here. Marius Bercea paints vaguely Manet-like, vaguely ironic scenes of people I have no interest in. Wanda Koop’s lurid paintings of moonlit nights are kitsch sci-fi art without the monsters. I was drawn to a super-realist painting of a birdhouse because it looked so trite – it turns out to be by the hugely sought after and high-priced Kerry James Marshall. He’s the Jeff Koons of figurative art.
Even galleries renowned for outrageous conceptual art are peddling paint: Paris dealer Emmanuel Perrotin was once persuaded to dress as a rabbit by Maurizio Cattelan, but the Perrotin booth is more painterly than dadaist. Jay Jopling’s White Cube is dominated not by the bad boys of yore but one of the best painterly moments, a juxtaposition of expressionist nudes by Tracey Emin and the veteran German painter Georg Baselitz: while Baselitz’s painting of his wife is inexplicably ethereal, a pale trace of humanity floating in the darkness of a lonely night, Emin’s pink and red explosions of breasts, buttocks and vaginas pummel fleshly existence in your face.
Baselitz, who has been painting for more than six decades, has an advantage over younger artists here. Painting takes time. It doesn’t work in the same way as video or photography – it’s got an ancient tradition behind it and to be new, you have to face up to the old. It can take a lifetime. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a brilliant painter who may become a great one: her painting To Satiate a Satyr for a Saint is easy to pass by in the hubbub; yet if you pause, it holds you with its enigmatic relationship between two figures seated at a table, one reading, the other lost in reverie. This is a real, subtle painting by an artist who’s engaged with her craft and its mysteries.
If the fashion for painting so evident at Frieze London continues, it could get exciting. What now seems a random grab bag of so-so painting might give birth to much better painters. But it won’t happen. This is, transparently, a convulsion of rich people’s tastes. Who knows what will be hot at Frieze next year? It could be dog turds on plinths.
And anyway, if painting is the new thing, why not go for the greats? At Frieze Masters, once the security staff have strip-searched you, your mind is blown on arrival by the Sam Fogg stall with its dumbfounding wares of Renaissance art. I watched a smooth guy sell a couple a Della Robbia. Across the aisle was a Bacon. Further into the mouth-watering feast of superlative art, I chanced on a painting by the Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi and her collaborators. She depicts Bathsheba at her bath, being spied on by King David – but she lays the stress on the young woman’s female companions, making it a painting of female solidarity.
I wouldn’t want to make Frieze Masters sound worthy, though. It exudes decadence. I love the stall selling bronze armour, the Dutch still lifes, the Bosch-like Flemish nightmares and carnivals … now this is painting. Oily, voluptuous, almost edible. Everywhere you look there seems to be another genius: a Pissarro, a wall of Freuds, and some stupendous Auerbachs. If you want an abstract painting, don’t get the skimpy efforts at the stupid fair, come to the clever one and get a Sean Scully. Sculpted pumpkins are all very well, but Frieze Masters has an actual dinosaur for sale. Oh – and a meteorite.
Frieze Masters is sexier and more devilish than this year’s frankly dull Frieze London. Perhaps that is because in the contemporary fair, the dealers and collectors all seem to be on their best behaviour, insisting they care, and prefer the authenticity of paint to the schlock of the new. At Masters, there are no such inhibitions. It is a rampant display of desirable wonders that had me salivating, raging, then lusting even more. Riches for the rich.
• Frieze London and Frieze Masters are at Regent’s Park, London, until 16 October.
