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self-help guide to frieze frieze - The question on the inaugural edition of Frieze may be whether or not the British interlopers would upset the Armory Show, our increasingly moribund local art fair, as New York's leading festival of contemporary art and conspicuous consumption. For your dealers as well as the collectors it's too soon to inform - Frieze opens on Friday after a collectors' preview on Thursday. But this is a greater fair than has been expected the first time out, though in contrast to its " old world " cousin it is a safer affair, with little grit and lots of gloss.

Frieze Art Fair - The very best news: Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover made the best call by holding Frieze on Randall's Island, a park within the East river usually frequented only by little-league baseball players. New Yorkers had been sceptical - it's hard enough to have us to cross Manhattan, aside from have a ferry (or limousine) throughout the water. But about the island, Frieze has enough space for any sinuous white tent, produced by the young Brooklyn architectural duo SO-IL, which curves along the waterfront. The tent offers continuous vistas along the fair - handsomer than other events' gridded chicken coops, though somewhat intimidating as well. You can find 180 galleries here, but nowhere to cover. The initial Frieze art fair, for many its wealth, remains closer to its scruffy east London roots compared to old-money fairs in Basel or Maastricht. There is however no mistaking that Frieze The big apple is all business, and provocations of the type London audiences have started to expect - wrecked booths, disruptive performances, installations that mock art market absurdities - are not in evidence. Maccarone, a typically confrontational gallery, is showing a sculpture by the brothers Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen, incorporating a tree from an Alaskan island where they lived for weeks - but additionally a 12-metre abstract striped painting by Ann Craven, elegant but benign. Even Gavin Brown, a once reliably provocative Anglo-American dealer, has mounted an attractive but extremely safe booth, centered on seven achingly delicate paintings by Laura Owens, all linked together by a wooden mesh.

frieze magazine - As stated on this frieze review: The largest galleries have got few chances. Require a monochrome Anish Kapoor disc to embellish your third home? Get a giant yellow one or even a a bit smaller version in tasteful bronze - or else just hold back until you and the 1% friends meet later this spring in Hong Kong or Basel, where one can try again. It's more rewarding to invest time in the single-artist installations by younger galleries, which Sharp and Slotover have placed smack in the middle from the fair. Among the lessons you'll learn: New York is finished and all the cool American kids have moved to LA. At Redling Artwork, Liz Glynn has made papier-mache replicas of gold jewellery from pawn shops throughout the Town of Angels. Money is irregular, she reminds us, and there is a market for everything.