Frieze London & Masters 2026: A note from the other side
Updated: 1 day ago
I usually prefer Masters because it offers a kind of variety and depth you can't easily find elsewhere, objects and paintings that carry centuries in them that ask something of you beyond the immediate. London, by contrast, is fun, modern, loud. But this year, something inverted. I enjoyed Frieze London, but only up to a point. Masters left me colder than expected, and I will get back to that.
But first, I should be honest about where I'm standing. I work in heritage projects, curating public programmes and exhibitions with communities. The other side of the spectrum compared with fairs. I also make art. Fairs are part of the ecosystem, I understand the business, the necessity of the market, the fact that galleries need these moments to survive. But I need more context, perhaps a bit less people, less peacocking, to actually see the art. And Frieze is nothing if not a peacock's parade most of the time. This isn't a complaint about commerce per se. It's an observation about what commerce does to attention. When the room is designed for being seen, looking becomes secondary. The art is there, but it's competing. So that's why I fly under the radar when I go, headphones on.
Anyway, let's talk about art.
What I did find at London was a willingness to play with display, to take risks beyond the white cube. Artist-to-Artist stood out for me this year, artists nominating other artists, putting their peers forward rather than waiting for the market to decide. It's a small structural gesture, but it matters: a section where the logic isn't just "who sells" but "who deserves to be seen." The work was placed, not just hung. You could feel the difference in the room. It wasn't just product. It was an argument. There was plenty of figurative painting and some tech-inflected work elsewhere, but Artist-to-Artist was where the fair felt most alive.
Masters, in fact, felt flatter this year. The depth was there, of course. But the fair didn't offer the escape I wanted. I kept recognising works, works I had seen last year, or the year before, circulating again. You can tell how the market is at the moment. The same names, the same estates, the same certainties. Refinement can become its own kind of repetition.
Now, a thing I need to mention to the overall fair. Every Frieze week, the same language circulates: Making art accessible. And I want to pause there, because access is not the same as accessibility.
Access is an invitation. Accessibility is the conditions that make the invitation meaningful. A post about Frieze reaching thousands of people, how accessible is it, really, and to what level? Then the post is access without accessibility. It's visibility without structural change. It's the aesthetic of inclusion without the labour of it.
I'm not exempt from this critique. Here I am making a post about it, ha! One of the many. I work in art community spaces and heritage, but I also move through these fairs, and I know the contradiction. What I would like to see from Frieze, and from the writing around it, is less performance of openness and more honesty about what the form actually permits.
So here's where I've landed. If access is not accessibility, and if even the most interesting sections are still inside a structure that demands performance, then my own participation needs to be more deliberate too. To be continued...
And I'll keep looking, critically, even when it's uncomfortable.
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