Champagne, humiliation and Leonardo DiCaprio: It's Frieze 2025

There is a meme which goes something like: “I love travelling, but it’s crazy how I’m always at the airport on everyone else’s first day on earth.” One could make the same link between a fondness for the visual arts and the experience of attending Frieze — the international art fair which last week came to London for its twenty-third edition and where nobody, I mean nobody, knows how to walk in a straight line. In fact, it is perhaps wise not to conflate a love of art with a love of the art world and its shenanigans, especially if you are of a tax bracket less likely to leave the tent with a Rose Wylie, more likely a bout of Covid-19. One will leave you stimulated, curious, pensive, elated. The other may well leave you for dead. 

What makes Frieze different from other industry-specific events, such as London Fashion Week, is that there is a certain level of public access granted. Alongside the numerous free exhibition openings and fringe events, you can purchase weekend entry for the main fair for about £50 (which, considering a single exhibition at the Royal Academy will set you back £25, feels about right). This also means that, for one fevered week, the entire city is consumed by it. London’s sky hangs heavy with fumes from non-dom collectors’ 4x4s and art students’ Marlboro Reds. There are so many competing parties that you really don’t have to be a gallerina in order to drink for free, as long as your nerves can stand it. But if you’re in pursuit of something a little more refined than gratis booze, there is a network of usually friendly PRs turned impenetrable Cerberuses to remind you that actually, there is a scene — and you’re not in it. 

My Frieze week got off to a promising start on the eve of the fair itself, at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in Ladbroke Hall, where three concurrent exhibitions — by Rick Owens Furniture, Atelier Van Lieshout and Thibault Hazelzet — were on display. A decidedly masculine affair with definite shag-pad overtones, the artworks on show include a tangle of antlers, a braying wolf cast in bronze and a timber-framed day bed draped in sumptuous chocolate-coloured fur, yet once through to the bar it was actually a pretty good time. 

Industry events can often be staid, formal affairs, where people beeline for the step-and-repeat (it’s essential that everyone knows you were there, afterall) but never really let their hair down. With this in mind, my date for the week — a devilishly handsome political journalist with the recently self-appointed moniker “Mr Frieze” — and I were determined to get people moving on the dance floor, and lead by example. But to our surprise, and despite the horrifying lack of an open bar, the dancing needed no encouragement, thanks to a fabulously wedding-adjacent DJ set from Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor. People were bopping with a sincerity and uninhibitedness that temporarily confounded all my preconceptions about art world pretension. “They’re kind of stealing our thunder,” Mr Frieze said resentfully, eyeing a couple enthusiastically throwing shapes nearby to a remix of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me”. Who could blame them? But, upstaged, we soon called it a night. 

Those aforementioned preconceptions about elite levels of snobbery were reinforced in dramatic fashion the next afternoon, when I approached the tent on the south side of Regent’s Park for the fair proper. Sandwich boards along the Georgian boulevards signposted the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge, courtesy of the fair’s key partner, and the first words I heard, muttered by a good-looking, smartly dressed and pissed off group exiting the fair, were “narcissists” and “self-entitled”. I spent the first hour cursing the size of the ostentatious fold-out map and trying not to cry — oh, and looking at art! 168 galleries came to Frieze this year and some of them brought some proper lush bits ‘n’ bobs, if you’ll pardon the technical jargon. At Maureen Paley, Behrang Karimi’s Kosmische Heilung, 2025, a naively rendered dog standing on the back of a human who himself has near dog-like proportions, stirred me in spite of my oncoming art hives, as did Issy Wood’s luscious oil on velvet piece E1 / WC1, 2025, which I would have loved to rub my face against.