Does London Still Need Frieze?

The Y2k gallery scene in London used to rely on Frieze to thrive - but the fair's sensationalism risks eclipsing the real rush going on in the city's art world. London is brimming with fresh artistic talents showing across new, radical spaces, so why are we still so fixated on the white tent?

On Frieze’s 20th birthday in 2023, London’s premiere art fair was at a dark place: post-Brexit meant that sales were strangled by bureaucratic nightmares, while the tepid work on display was subject to cutthroat criticism (“creative as a shopping mall”, “unashamedly commercial” were among terms thrown around).

This year seems much more favourable: “a riot of creativity” (The Times); “a return to its cutting-edge roots” (The Standard), “stunning art, and stunning price tags” (The Guardian), (“upbeat”) New York Times. Frieze’s 2025 triumph will allow many in London’s top art echelons to breathe easy - the buzz is back! - but why does it matter?

Frieze is a big deal for people in the art world, but for the large majority on the outside, it only alienates a wider audience from London’s art scene. The buzz and hype is about watching rich people buying art, and the eye-popping figures they are willing to spend, rather than looking at the art itself.

"The most interesting, unfiltered, political and radical exhibitions are happening across London. We’re wrong to use Frieze as a metric for the impetus of the wider art scene"

That’s nothing new - but it’s ultimately a waste and a shame given the energy of London’s art world right now. London’s gallery scene is booming - the number of dealer and gallery businesses rose by 14% in the period from 2019 to 2023 - fringe venues in radical spaces that offer interesting and unfiltered exhibitions. We’re wrong to use Frieze as a metric for the impetus of London’s wider art scene - the fair monopolises conversation about art in the city, but is a poor reflection of what’s really going on.

“I would like to emphasise how little I think about Frieze,” says Gabrielle de la Puente, one half of the anarchist art critic duo, The White Pube. “The majority of the country does not care. It's like London is under an annual hallucination.”

In their book, Poor Artists, which is a semi-fictional surrealist chronicle of the nonsensical world of British art world that draws from interviews with artists, gallerists and own experience, de la Puente writes:

One half of the art world values aesthetics over ideas and comes up with shit like art fairs - and the other half values ideas over aesthetics and is stingy as fuck.

Except from Poor Artists by The White Pube

“The art world that I want to engage with is one of ideas. There are a few people who decide who gets to be an artist or not. Between governments and commercial heads, it's opportunities that have a lot of strings attached to them,” says de la Puente, considering Frieze’s place among the wider warped system that controls the art world.

“That’s evident in the stuff that's on in galleries. People aren't allowed to respond to the genocide in Palestine, speak explicitly about anything. You get to a certain level and it’s like ‘just make some decoration, don’t make art that has any substance’.”

It feels absurd to walk around Regent’s Park next to the 1% able to buy a 68-million-year-old triceratops skull for £650,000 at a time when a genocide against Palestine has been live-streamed on our social media, an urgent ceasefire is being tepidly negotiated, the Met is clamping down on freedom to protest while London has become focal point of the largest far-right nationalist demonstrations in decades.

At a time when we’re boycotting festivals for their sponsors, it’s worth stressing that Frieze is sponsored by Deutsche Bank - which has been called out for its financial ties to Israel at protests in Los Angeles ahead of Frieze LA's 2024 edition. Perhaps in response to this, Frieze has tried to assuage concerns of its detachment from reality - last year Bani Abidi’s ‘Fragments of a Nightmare’ directly reckoned with the ongoing genocide, while this year Frieze Master’s welcomed Palestinian artist Samia Halaby in its ‘Studio’ - who has faced censorship and show cancellations in the in US, where she is based, in recent years.

While London’s 2025 Frieze was seemingly, and perhaps disconcertingly, free of protest, the art world’s shadowy links was called out last year in London’s Turner Prize, when over 100 cultural workers decried the artwashing of human rights abuse, prompting winner Jasleen Kaur to express solidarity in her acceptance speech: “I want the separation between the expression of politics in the gallery and the practice of politics in life to disappear. I want the institution to understand that if you want us inside you need to listen to us outside.”

Kaur’s speech detailed the powerlessness of artists to remove themselves from the webs spun by institutions - “I’ve been wondering why artists are required to dream up liberation in the gallery but when that dream meets life we are shut down”. In a structural sense, there's no denying that Frieze offers an important ‘breakthrough’ moment for emerging artists.

Despite the commercialism and the noise, Frieze is a place of connection and visibility for artists doing powerful work. Take Turner Prize nominee Rene Matić - one of the finest generational talents in the UK right now, whose work was acquired by Tate at Frieze in 2021, and is now on permanent display in Tate Britain.

“Despite its commercialism and chaos, Frieze offers young artists exposure, connections and a well deserved chance to see their work in dialogue with both peers and some of the most significant contemporary art being made today,” says Matić, whose work is deeply engaged with the wider political backdrop of Britain. Their Turner Prize nominated work AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH explores identity and belonging, as a queer Black Briton, reflecting on a time of increasing polarity.

“I think that criticism is fair, but it’s also complicated. Frieze is undeniably commercial - it’s about selling work, positioning, visibility - all the things that can feel quite far from why most of us make art in the first place,” they say. “But I also think there’s something revealing about it. It exposes the systems that art is tied up in, and sometimes that can be useful to look at rather than reject outright.”

“Criticism is fair, but it’s also complicated. Frieze ... is about selling work, positioning, visibility - all the things that can feel quite far from why most of us make art in the first place”

It’s worth pausing here to consider the systems that Frieze itself has introduced and embodied. Frieze was first established in London in 2003 as an alternative to the blue chip crowd typical of major art fairs at the time - young and hip compared to the stuffiness of Basel, more daring and experimental than the billionaires overbidding safe classics at New York’s Armory Show.

it always existed to chase high prices, capitalising on the success of the Young British Artists of the 1990s (Emin, Hirst, Lucas, Hume) and the establishment of Tate Modern in 2000. The fair consisted of 124 galleries who drew 27,700 visitors, grouping 1,200 contemporary artists, including Hirst, Emin and Murakami, in a three-day fair at a pop-up white tent in Regent’s Park.

But now, there seems to be no end to its growth: it introduced the historical art focused Frieze Masters in 2012, the same year it branched into New York, followed by Los Angeles in 2019 and Seoul in 2023, also acquiring the Armory and EXPO Chicago, with Frieze Abu Dhabi launching next year. This year, Frieze was reported acquired for around $200 million, exponentially increasing its worth in its two-decade lifespan. Now London’s flagship edition attracts up to 100,000 attendees - over 3 times larger than 2003.

Over twenty years ago, Frieze’s arrival in London breathed new life into the city’s fringe venues and galleries. Together with Tate, which was established in 2000, it cemented London’s place as an unparalleled contemporary arts haven, injecting money and energy into the city’s independent galleries, in turn feeding back into the underground culture that many of its artists broke out from.

The staggering hyperinflation of the Frieze machine is significant when debating whether London’s broader art ecosystem is still reliant on it. With the introduction of Paris’ Art Basel in 2023, the Frieze heads seem to be preoccupied about having their status as Europe’s premier contemporary art fair eclipsed, with post-Brexit and non-dom tax laws threatening sales.

Addressing these concerns, Frieze director Simon Fox has welcomed the idea of a ‘Barbenheimer’ moment, where Frieze can share crowds heading to Paris. Yet Paris’ privately-funded, luxury-adjacent art scene and the overall ethos of the Basel fairs used to be what Frieze distinguished itself from - London’s version was more punk, down to quirky curation to its anti-glam tent setting. Instead of puffing out its chest as a rival capable of pulling in the A-listers, hosting flashy dinners, raising the mega money, it should be doubling down on what London is that Paris is not.

"Paris and other places are not tapping into the counter culture happening within their cities. The one thing that is unique about London is that we tap into our culture."

It’s a differentiation that has come into sharp contrast with community-focused galleries such as Harlesden High Street shaking up the independent art scene. “Paris and other places are not tapping into the counter culture happening within their cities. The one thing that is unique about London is that we do tap into our culture,” Jonny Tanna, who runs the Harlesden gallery and is behind the non-fair Minor Attractions.

“The unique thing about Minor Attractions and about what we’re doing at the gallery is that we tap into real things, the music scene, the film scene, and the cultural scene.”

We shouldn’t have to wait for Frieze to ignite London’s art scene at its fullest, or acknowledge everything that’s going on in the city, in smaller fringe spaces including Cubitt, SET, TACO, Auto Italia and Forma.

“I truly believe that we don't need to only do things when major things are happening. I think the beauty of our city is that ultimately people love to get together and love to share art, music, whatever it is, and explore that together,” says photographer Bernice Mulenga, whose LMK WHEN U REACH exhibition is currently showing at Auto Italia. “We shouldn't limit ourselves to just doing it when [Frieze] is happening. Outside of these moments, we still exist. I think it's important to remember that.”

"We shouldn't limit ourselves to just doing it when [Frieze] is happening. Outside of these moments, we still exist. I think it's important to remember that."

London's art world doesn't need Frieze to thrive. A marketplace that exists purely to sell to the ultrawealthy, we need to flip the whole narrative around Frieze week. London hosts multitude of fine emerging artists within it should not be celebrated only under the guise of the fair. We can find ways to exploit it while it still exists - but rather than to keep feeding its ballooning empire, we need to double down on the independent, community run structures that offer purer reflections of artistic values, where work isn’t just measured on figures, but impact.

de la Puente underscores this thought - there’s greater power to be found in supporting the structures outside of the tent than attempting to subvert something within it. “It's like a metaphor: you are pissing inside the tent. You're not dismantling anything, you're putting on a show that they have pre-approved. So how critical can you really be? Would you not rather be on the outside pissing all over it?”