The inside story of the UK’s most expensive art fair – and its £4.5m banana

I’m standing in front of a wall, on which 371 promotional pens from pharmaceutical companies are fixed in regular rows by white zip ties: 9 lines of 40, trailed by one of 11. This is Portrait V by Carolyn Lazard, represented here at Frieze London by German gallery Trautwein Herleth, and each pen – as with each of the works in the artist’s Portrait series – comes from the collection of one single doctor or healthcare provider, accumulated before a 2009 directive required drug companies to stop disseminating such “non-educational” freebies. The work is conceptually elegant, bleakly humorous – and precisely the kind of thing that gets art sceptics frothing at the mouth. Pens on a wall? Are you having me on? And it costs how much? Between $20,000 (£15,000) and $30,000, if you must know – admittedly quite the mark-up on its original materials. But while $20k is a huge sum, it’s distinctly small fry at Frieze, a kind of mobile art world mecca that pops up at annual intervals everywhere from New York to Seoul. Every October, it’s London’s turn to host. Frieze is a fair, which means people are there to buy and sell – but it’s also a pageant, an unofficial industry convention: each year, the production seems to get bigger and shinier, the outfits more extraordinary, the amounts of money changing hands more eye-watering. This year, a press release sent to journalists after the fact reported major sales including “a new painting by Michaël Borremans, placed for $1.5m, Avery Singer’s Solver (v.3) for $800,000, and George Condo’s Figure Composition for $600,000.”371 promotional pens from pharmaceutical companies are fixed in regular rows by white zip ties in ‘Portrait V’ by Carolyn Lazard (Photo: Linda Nylind/Frieze) None of this does much for visual art’s public perception as elitist, of course. As an industry, it remains notoriously insular, with class differences more pronounced in museum and gallery attendance than any other cultural sector. As such, the outsize price tags make people angry, even if they tolerate similar sums elsewhere (huge fees for athletes and celebrities, for instance, are things we roll our eyes at, but ultimately accept as the way the world works). As tabloids have long since discovered, provocative pieces like Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 Comedian, a banana duct-taped to a wall that sold for $6.2m in 2024, are almost guaranteed to generate uproar – and while that’s part of the point, such in-jokes and stunts hardly endear the sector to a frustrated outsider. Even insiders find the landscape distasteful at times: The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones wrote that one booth at this year’s London fair “could have been designed as a Marxist exposé of the art market”. Still, whether you think the cash is glamorous or ghastly, it’s what keeps the whole thing afloat – and for those looking to better understand the industry, there are worse places to start than here at Frieze. So let’s get granular – the fair itself is actually two: Frieze London and Frieze Masters. The former is where the young people are and the contemporary stuff is happening – next to Trautwein Herleth, for instance, is London-based gallery TINA, showing work by Karim Boumjimar, whose performance collective Young Boys Dancing Group collaborated with Madonna earlier this year. Works on the booth start from €3,500 (£3,000). At Frieze Masters, both prices and the ages of attendees escalate dramatically: people with sharp tailoring and fat chequebooks gather excitedly round offerings like Andy Warhol’s Queen Elizabeth II (Royal Edition), 1985 – yours for a cool $365,000 from New York gallery Susan Sheehan. When you’re talking about sums that could buy a house outright, it’s no wonder people bristle, especially in a cost of living crisis. What’s more, the market is inherently self-reflexive – and therefore abstruse – because art’s monetary value has very little to do with conventional indexes like preciousness of materials or hours of labour. Given the number of 0s involved, you might assume that prices at fairs like this are spat out by some all-knowing algorithm, based on specific, tangible data. But while the market relies on such illusions to make sense of itself and get buyers over the line (to be fair, if I dropped half a million on a painting, I’d want to be validated, too), there is really no such thing as an objective assessment of value. In reality, a work’s financial value and its aesthetic, intellectual or emotional merit often don’t match at all. Maurizio Cattelan’s 2019 ‘Comedian’, a banana duct-taped to a wall, sold for $6.2m in 2024, causing a predictable outcry (Photo: John Nacion/Getty) Rather, besides an artist’s reputation, work is priced based on the prices of other work; that is, what comparable pieces sell for elsewhere, or how much the last one went for. Sure, there exist loose industry rules of thumb – ceramics versus painting, emerging artists versus established names – but when all is said and done, the art market is a circular, self-powering engine, and things are worth what people will pay for them. So a big purchase is perhaps best thought of as an investment – bought not because someone needs something pretty to go above the mantelpiece, but because they’re predicting that in 20 years its value will have soared. Just as with stocks and shares, there are safe bets – the Warhols or the Picassos – likely to tick up steadily, and big swings, relative unknowns who can be snapped up for a song before they hit the big time, like Bitcoins in 2011 when they still cost a dollar each. For big collectors, new acquisitions are just as likely to be shut in a temperature-controlled storage facility as put on display. Far be it from me to defend the art market itself, especially when its upper echelons can be so grotesque. What does seem worth insisting on is the right of art to cost money. Why shouldn’t ideas (upon which so much contemporary art pivots) be worth as much as fancy handbags or hedge funds, even if some of the sums mean they’re out of reach for almost all of us? And at the other end of the scale, why shouldn’t creatives expect to be able to eke a living from their practices, selling what they make like any other craftsperson or entrepreneur? After all, despite the glossy veneer of fairs like Frieze, the vast majority of working artists (including some represented there) make a relative pittance. No, really. Say an imaginary artist has one solo show every few years; if their prices fall between Boumjimar’s and Lazard’s at $10,000 a piece and they sell three, that’s $30k, half of which goes to the gallery representing them. Opportunities to take a few extra bits to markets like Frieze are vital, for artists and galleries alike; even then, booths can cost tens of thousands of pounds, with no guarantee of selling a thing. Many visitors to Frieze London have deep pockets, yet few artists are raking in huge sums (Photo: Linda Nylind/Frieze) While the art market certainly has the capacity to make some of its participants hideously wealthy (Damien Hirst is supposedly worth more than £300m, for instance), the average UK artist makes just £16,150 per year, with only a third of that coming directly from their creative work. If they can secure gallery representation – that is, someone to produce their exhibitions and take their work to fairs – they’re customarily splitting profits 50-50. Bleaker still, funding from the Arts Council is down 55 per cent since 2010, increasingly cementing commercial avenues as the only viable means of keeping the lights on. Sure, some dealers make huge profits, as in any industry (see Frieze Masters, where sales are often from one mega-wealthy collector to another), but most mental images you have of artists and gallerists cackling as they count stacks of cash can be put to bed. And with money set aside, there’s room for far more pertinent questions – like, which ideas do you think are important? What do you find beautiful, exciting, or infuriating? Because while the art market might seem unaccountable, one thing’s for sure: high prices don’t correlate with worthwhile work. Ultimately, the price of a piece is almost always the least interesting thing about it, revealing more about the market than the object itself. Unless you’re a collector – who cares what this stuff costs? Frieze does, of course. Whatever it might like to think of itself, the fair functions less as an arena of taste-making than a pulse check for the industry at large: revealing what’s costly, rather than what’s valuable, and the gulf between the two. Speaking of checking pulses: with all this talk of muddling mission with money, Portrait V is looking more poignant by the minute. Can I interest you in a promotional pen?