Frieze Review: More Avant-Garde Surprises Await in the Bake Off Tent

Regent's Park, London: This year's art fair is a complicated sale of mid-level paintings for the ultra-rich, while its siblings have hawks, dinosaur skulls and looted artifacts. Welcome to the art market, where the strangest naked people walk out of the ground waving their hands and screaming, while someone with a bird's head and wings plays the bagpipes. This is my favourite artwork at F

People run out of the field, waving and shouting, while someone with a bird's head and wings plays babas. It's my favorite piece of art at this year's Frieze, but don't look for this wildly imaginative rage in the crowd of contemporary art at Frieze London. The painting is by a 16th-century follower of Hieronymus Bosch and is on display at the Frieze Masters, an elegant marquee on the other side of Regent's Park.

And oh my god, those paintings. There seem to be millions of them. And a beautiful white marquee full of gallery booths along endless white corridors is a terrible way to show them, a terrible way to see. It's not as fun as visiting galleries, which can be interesting spaces. Here, everything is packed like a big shop - Selfridges of Art.

Freeze is claimed to define the new and find the stars of tomorrow. But obviously it really caters to the needs of retailers and the tastes of a very affluent type of consumer. This is most evident on VIP Day when I walk in with a bunch of tech bros, hedge fund managers, retired hedge fund managers, their kids and - is that George Osborne? - who were actually here to buy these things. At Frieze Masters, I was about to ask the price of an Anselm Kiefer work, obscured by matted vegetation, when an elderly couple beat me to it. They were really interested in shopping. The price was only one million tomans.

Things you can wear Your wall is the most collectible art yet. At Frieze Masters, you'll find works by "modern masters," many of whom are deceased: a series of colorful, graffiti-filled visual poems by Cy Twombly, a dark gray nude by Leon Kossoff. But in the contemporary exhibition, some of that sales standard is messy. At the Night Gallery booth in Los Angeles, Wanda Cope's Radiance-Together depicts two candles burning side by side in a blue and purple space. Oh, cute, who on earth takes this seriously? Another of its artists, Andy Woll, shows a series of equally empty mountain landscapes. Meanwhile, at the aptly named Grimm Gallery, Rosalind Nashashibi – best known for her films – is exhibiting a silly painting of lovers between flowery borders.

Now here's something different - a row of mineral-like white growths, eerily lovely, mysteriously organic: they're Helen Chadwick's Peace Flowers, a chance to own examples of a modern classic from this extraordinary artist who died in 1996. Why isn't he over at Frieze Masters? And behind the Edel Assanti stand is a set of a faucet by Lonnie Holley on a rusty pipe with wire and two green bottles on a rough wooden stand. It has the raw taste of real life. Holley, a musician and artist from Birmingham, Alabama who captivated me a few years ago when he showed how he could create beauty from a random piece of wire, is a true American great who stands out at this one-of-a-kind festival.

So does Tracey Amin, Waqas Khan, Do Ho Suh, Catherine Opie and Zanele Muholi - but to be honest the success rate at Frieze London is about one in 10. That's pretty low for an event that claims to define the essence of art.

At Frieze Masters, you have the best certificate of quality available: time. If something has value after 50, 500, or 68,000,000 years, it's probably fine. 68 million years is not an exaggeration because here is a fossilized Triceratops skull with three horns. Will this really end up as a decoration in a rich person's home?

Let's put it in perspective. To call this head "museum quality" is an understatement. The Natural History Museum does not have a Triceratops fossil with this perfection. As the Guardian recently reported, paleontologists worry that the vogue for dinosaur specimens among the ultra-rich is driving up prices and locking up museums. Several such wonders are sold here.

Frieze Masters is more visually exciting than Frieze London. It is more fruity, more exotic. You can buy armor, silverware, Arabian carpets, things that a decadent woman might have surrounded herself with in 1896. It makes you realize how consistent the contemporary exhibition is. At Frieze Masters, you can indulge your most deviant tastes—there are plenty of sleazy 19th-century nudes.

But if it is more interesting, it is also more disgusting. The booths fetishize objects of the past, pulling them out of context to display as brightly lit vignettes: a cut-screen manuscript of the Codex Ann, a face mask from an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, a stone head of a priest from 2nd-century Palmyra. These things belong in museums, but here they are all in the distinct spotlight of luxury and money.

This is the festival of capitalism in progress. I could jokingly say you might buy this or that, but you wouldn't unless you were a scillionaire, not me. What did Andy Burnham say about the oppression of neoliberalism? Here he distorts art into a delirious revelry of commodification.

The stall could have been designed as a Marxist representation of the art market. African wood carvings sit in front of a 1920 nude kitsch by Giacomo Grosso. The luxuriant view of the model's pervert as she lays on silk clothes and the fact that she's wearing high heels hilariously suggest that this is soft and subtle porn. African art, made for religious purposes, is reduced to decoration in contrast to this commodity body. John Berger, the radical critic who saw nude paintings and other forms of commodity art as playthings of Western capitalism, might have said: Told you so.