Artist Banks Violette’s massive graphite and gloss canvas at Team Gallery’s Frieze Art Fair booth says, “I would rather be killing my family.” But Valentino, Elle Macpherson, Gwen Stefani, Daphne Guinness, Tom Ford, Courtney Love, and the other attendees at the opening of the ninth Frieze seemed happy to mingle and peruse the art instead.Even [...]

Why is London cooler than usual? Because it’s Frieze-ing. But, given that Germans seemed to be the dominant nationality on the opening day of the Frieze Art Fair, it made sense that it was Claudia Schiffer’s open-to-buy budget that was giving gallerists chills. Plus, she was appropriately emblematic of the fashion/art nexus that gives Frieze [...]

It’s not entirely out of place that the Kandinsky Prize event, the Russian equivalent of the Turner Prize, was relocated to London this year. Russians have always flocked here, and they show up in force during Frieze. On Friday night, after a frenzy of viewing and spending, the grandees of the Russian community converged at [...]

It was a long trip to East London last night, both literally and metaphorically, for two fêtes: one hosted by a Spice Girl for a mobile phone, and the other hosted by Charles Finch and Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis in honor of the Frieze Art Fair. Metaphorically, it was an aesthetic transition from my [...]

Daisy Lowe and Will Blondelle are among the people we’ve spotted queuing up for a fag at Norma Jean’s controversial smoking-booths installation, The Straight Story at the Frieze Art Fair. The anonymous artist, whose identity was born on the day Marilyn Monroe died and who’s got a reputation for outrageousness (making cheese from breast milk, [...]

You would think when there were literally half a dozen parties going on last night in this town (a Sotheby’s opening, a Gagosian Gallery party, a Cartier dinner, etc. etc.), that space wouldn’t be an issue. Are there even that many people in London that can fill this many parties? Well, the answer, I found [...]

Starting last week, there has been talk about which London haunt would be the unofficial go-to destination for Frieze. Would it be Amy Sacco’s Bungalow 8? (It could be, as Sacco is in town, often on the arm of Eva Mendes.) Would it be somewhere in East London, where all the cool kids hang out? [...]

The description VIP is thrown around quite liberally these days (personally, I think a true VIP needn’t require a stamp or a wrist band, but that’s besides the point). So even though I managed to wrangle myself a VIP pass to the Frieze Art Fair and its haughty preview day, my hopes weren’t that high [...]

Cory Arcangel is best known for digital art projects—hacking into Nintendo game cartridges, erasing everything but the clouds in Super Mario, slowing Tetris down to an excruciatingly torpid pace. But for this year’s Frieze Projects, curated by Neville Wakefield, Arcangel is hacking into the art world’s biggest high-stakes game: the Fair itself. Using Willy Wonka [...]

For aspiring art collectors who find that money is no longer no object but are still craving a culture fix, London’s premier artist/curator, Jasper Joffe, has a solution. Billed as “the Art Fair for the Credit Crunch,” Joffe’s Free Art Fair, which opens today, presents works by 50 artists. “Contrasting with the recent Damien Hirst [...]