Arts for art’s sake- At the right price, of course

Sometimes having a press card can be very handy, and not just for waving in officers’ faces when you’re about to get arrested.

The other day it got me into the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park, London, which would otherwise have cost fifty quid just to wander, mesmerised, through the giant white tents gazing in amazement at art so expensive none of it is priced.

“We don’t give out prices to the press,” someone said when I asked about the giant Jeff Koons lobster. I imagine the price range was more Kazakh oligarch than skint freelancer. That ex-Wall Street trader Koons is an artist at all is debatable — it’s not like he actually gets his hands dirty, other than to dream up new ways of making bad art and to count his millions. Which I suppose is an art in itself. Kind of.

There were 2,000 artists not just on show, but on sale. You could buy a puddle — that is, a resin pothole filled with dirty water complete with crumpled plastic bag — for €4,000, or a my-kid-could-do-that David Shrigley drawing for around the same. This is why there were no prices on the work — price tags would not only have distracted from the art, but would have become the art itself. Remember Damien Hirst’s diamond skull a few years ago, on sale for £50m? The actual skull itself was irrelevant — the price tag had become the art. The art of fleecing rich people.

Usually, if you’re a prole you get to experience art as a prole. You rock up to the prole art outlets — galleries and museums — and see art for free, or for a tenner, or whatever. You are surrounded by tourists, school kids on a day trip, art students, grannies, people pushing buggies — the art lovers, the bored, the curious, all rubbing shoulders under ‘No Photography’ signs.

At Frieze, you could take as many photos of the art as you liked, because it was not art as much as product for sale. There were no tourists, no mildly interested people pushing buggies — just the closed loop of artists, dealers and collectors, being cautiously observed by journalists whose faces remained unlifted, whose lips, unlike the prices, remained uninflated. All around was a multilingual clamour of international art babble.

Turning away from the art, it felt like being trapped on a Woody Allen set — ageing wealth being fed by youthful glamour and vice versa, except with eccentric spectacles, expensive faces and Grayson Perry flatform shoes to signify membership of the Art Crowd.

The art itself, in all its endless variety, was invigorating, astonishing, funny, brilliant, moving, infuriating, ridiculous, and in a few cases, hit you right in the heart. This is what art is for. Pity about those invisible price tags turning it all into hedge fund commodities.