Frieze your tits off

First and foremost, Frieze Art Fair is about looking at people. It is a warren of voyeurism. The art – glitzy, unaffordable, and on the whole, mediocre – merely facilitates desire. Arousal is the default position in this maze of ocular gratification. Which is just as well, seeing as there is little else to hold your attention.

From looking at the people around me, you’d think I was the only one who had perceived this underlying tone. Cool and indifferent they slouch around, oblivious to their immaculate splendour. Self-consciousness would seem out of place here – a sign of weakness, perhaps, or simply a defence against my prying eyes.

Richard Prince got it right in 2007 when, for his project at the Fair, he had a large breasted woman in bra and hotpants drape herself over a large, revolving American sports car. Everyone stood around trying to look cool, indifferent and 'unself-conscious'. Too middle class to ever visit a strip-club, I was like a child, having endured mandatory veganism from birth, tasting his first frankfurter. I soon made a dash for it when I found myself openly enjoying the spectacle.

Prince’s work subverted the dominant attitude – the indifference, the nonchalance – whilst aping the tacit notion that ‘sex sells’. But a market, delicate enough already, can hardly endure such a scathing internal critique this year. Instead we’re left with little to distract us from our own deviant disposition.

Most of the people at the Fair are not here to buy art and, like me, are art tourists. Normally younger than the art buyers, they take photos of cool things they see, like paintings of Manga-esque characters, or, oddly, anti-globalisation art which still seems to be fashionable in non western European countries. I don’t take photos and generally hate those that do.

Instead I attend a load of old boring talks and panel discussions about art and artists. One panel of famous art people, including Turner Prize nominated Roger Hiorns, discusses the platitudes of art; that contemporary art is elitist, that all artists are charlatans, and that poor people make better art as they have not been tainted by money and can thus make more radical work. It turns out all these assumptions are ridiculous. Phew!

What was to be the highlight for me, a discussion between the writer Mathew Higgs and the conceptual artist John Baldessari, turned out to be pure nonsense. Instead of Higgs asking a whole load of interesting, prying questions about Baldessari’s work and practice, Frieze Magazine asked its readers to pose the questions they wanted answered. What transpired was an explosion of egalitarian imbecility. We endured questions such as, what is your favourite colour? What is your favourite piece of work that you have ever made? And the literal turd in a shoebox: What is art? An absolute waste of everyone’s time, particularly Baldessari’s. But at least he got paid for it.

So art is still a mystery, the market is in denial and I’m still too poor to buy expensive art and refuse to settle for a crappy photo taken on my crappy phone. When I last visited Frieze Art Fair in 2007 I paid for the privilege. This year I wouldn’t have gone back if I hadn’t blagged a press pass. A day pass costs about the same as the entrance fee to a top exhibition at Tate Modern or the Hayward Gallery and offers little in comparison.

I wouldn’t even recommend Frieze Art Fair to the most avid of voyeurs. Even the most desperate pervert would be left wanting – and I should know.