Frieze or I'll shoot: Frieze Art Fair 09

For those that don’t know, Frieze Art Fair is more or less a market place where art is sold instead of fruit and veg. But whilst fruit and veg is sold according to the quality of its material attributes – smell, colour and freshness – art’s value is defined by underlying, mystical powers, known only to the select few.

A friend of mine told me that the name Mary Mary is being batted about like a Geldof forename in a Shoreditch nightclub. This, he explains, is despite all the work on display looking like a homogenous mulch. Imagine a derelict house that has been partially redecorated.

Doggerfisher has the usual mixture of utopian mystics. While Mary Mary might look a little monotone, the Dogfish gang seem a more frenzied bunch – a Nathan Coley light-box, a Lucy Skaer print, an elaborate, miniature Claire Barclay installation, a Charles Avery drawing. Neil Clements has painted Jem’s guitar again and hung it out of the way of the big-league rammy, benefitting from the dissociation.

Ingleby Gallery’s stall appears eccentric at first, but if you take away the seven foot photo of the sitting bear it seems considerably drearier. Asides from the beautiful, apparently smiling, bear, you are left with an assortment of works that collectively abuse the same limited palette – black, white and off-white.

The Modern Institute effortlessly steps up to the occasion and holds its head high among the bigwigs. It’s glitzy, it’s cool, it’s vapid, it’s scuzzy, it’s rich. Scott Myles’ work sustains my interest longer than most. A glass wedge, streaked with black is attached to the legs and castors of an office chair. It’s the Institute’s admixture of found and constructed objects.

Like the Barras market in Glasgow , Frieze Art Fair is there for the sheer spectacle of it. Contraband tobacco and toothless rogues are as equally remote from my day to day reality as art collecting oligarchs and Botox paralysis. One is as frighteningly alluring and repellently intimidating as the other.

At least you can get a little variety at the Barras. And perhaps a roll and sausage.