Frieze Art Fair 2010: Look Away Now

It was hard to believe we are ten years into a new millennium when wandering around this year’s Frieze Art Fair. There was no long perspective on display, except the endless lines of booths – only a sense of market fluctuations: a feeling that visitors carried with them from the ticket touts hawking ‘Frieze tickets’ outside Regent’s Park tube station to the exclusive Deutsche Bank hospitality offered to those who had the right passes. The step from one millennium to another is the work of a moment – barely the pop of a champagne cork – but the challenge it offers was already there in the period immediately leading up to it, and it still haunts us today. The truth is that, like all ghosts, this creeping sensation only manifests itself at inconvenient times – like at a crowded art fair, packed with people either deliberately looking away or simply staring in the wrong direction. The makeshift ResoVision studio, broadcasting 80 hours of live online television including the talk I was scheduled to give on the Sunday afternoon, seemed as good a vantage point as any to watch the great distraction unfold – and unfold it did.

Pictured above: Frieze Art Fair Logo seen from the exit side; Deutsche Bank welcomes you aboard; a Resonance reporter going undercover; Richard Thomas outside the ResoVision studio