Critic pans Frieze London, praises Frieze Masters — SkimNews
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- The Guardian critic declared Frieze London 'boring,' estimating a one-in-10 success rate for work on display and writing that 'you'll see more genuinely avant garde wonders in the Bake Off tent.'
- Frieze Masters proved visually richer in the reviewer's eyes, featuring modern masters including Cy Twombly's stained graffiti-laden visual poems and a grey nude by Leon Kossoff, plus a 16th-century Hieronymus Bosch follower canvas he called the fair's standout.
- An elderly couple purchased an Anselm Kiefer work at Frieze Masters for 'just shy of a million quid,' illustrating the fair's appeal to ultra-wealthy collectors alongside attendees described as 'tech bros, hedge-fund managers' and George Osborne.
- A 68-million-year-old Triceratops skull went on sale at Frieze Masters, a specimen the Natural History Museum does not own, with the Guardian noting palaeontologists are worried private dinosaur sales inflate prices and lock museums out.
- Frieze Masters drew the reviewer's ire for ripping historical objects from context — a manuscript page cut from its codex, an Egyptian coffin face mask, and a 2nd-century AD priest's head from Palmyra — displayed as brightly lit luxury gewgaws.
- The Colnaghi booth placed African wooden carvings made for religious purposes behind Giacomo Grosso's 1920 nude painting, which the critic framed as a 'Marxist exposé' of how western capitalism reduces sacred art to décor.
Why it matters: The review crystallises a tension the fairs embody for buyers, museums, and the public: ultra-rare specimens — a Triceratops fossil the Natural History Museum lacks, a Kiefer near £1m, a Palmyrene priest's head — flow to private collectors rather than institutions, with palaeontologists already warning that private sales are inflating prices and shutting museums out of the very patrimony they exist to hold.
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