Among the Giants: A Working-Class View of Frieze London

Yesterday was my first ever visit to the Frieze Art Fair. After nearly a year of applying through grants and bursaries for a ticket, I had almost given up.

Then, last weekend I received an email from Meg Maloy at the Working Arts Club saying a few Thursday tickets had become available to members. I applied immediately and a few hours later, I got the message, I had one. I felt like Charlie on his way to the Chocolate Factory!

After so much waiting, it finally happened.

⸻

Stepping inside was like entering another world. Each marquee felt the size of 2 football pitches... and there were four. The entrance itself could have passed for a fashion show runway: immaculate lighting, camera crews and rows of people dressed like moving fashion installations.

I often think you can almost chart art-world hierarchy by eyewear, the bigger the frames, the bigger the bank account.

Inside, I was surrounded by the biggest names in the global art circuit. Galleries from Paris, LA, Rome, Milan, New York, Hong Kong and beyond. It was impossible not to be impressed by the scale, the money, the spectacle.

⸻

At one booth, while looking at a Glenn Brown painting, I started talking to a collector. I confessed this was my first Frieze and asked what made it different from Frieze Masters. He replied: “Frieze is for the modern and the mad, the crypto holders looking for work that looks wild, young and sometimes makes no sense. Frieze Masters is where the old-guard collectors go, the connoisseurs and investors.”

Glenn Brown - Gagosian - New York

The contrast, as he described it, made sense later in the day.

Further in, I stopped before a striking painting dated 1906 — a simple yet unsettling face emerging from a haze of colour. When I asked the price, the gallerist answered, “This one’s 1.7.”I managed to ask, as calmly as I could, “Euros or Sterling?” — pretending I hadn’t just internally shouted one point seven what!?

After that, I needed some air. I sat outside with a drink, unfolded the map and planned which galleries to approach with Nick Fraser’s story. Each conversation felt like a small seed planted for what might come next.

At 5 p.m., the announcement came... closing time. I walked through Regent’s Park, stopping at the sculpture trail before heading to Frieze Masters.

The first thing I saw inside was a 68-million-year-old Triceratops skull, priced at £650,000 and already sold to a private collector. The red sticker on the card said it all.

Frieze Masters was, as predicted, a completely different world, fossils, maps, Renaissance sketches, French furniture and rare books. Centuries of human imagination gathered under one tent.

In less than 4 hours, I saw hundreds of artworks. Most blurred together. Not because they weren’t technically brilliant... some were incredible, but because the human mind isn’t built to process that much visual noise.

There’s a strange paradox at play in fairs like Frieze. They exist to celebrate creativity, yet they are underwritten by banks, luxury brands and oil companies. Entry alone costs a small fortune, hence why I couldn’t previously attend. The atmosphere feels like a competition between excess and sincerity.

I couldn’t help thinking how many soulful artists like Nick, who painted with no agenda other than to communicate what he felt, are left waiting at the back of a queue that money decides.

⸻

Art, at its core, is storytelling. It’s an intimate conversation between the artist and the viewer, a communion with something larger than both. Somewhere along the way, much of the art world has mistaken cleverness for depth.

But sincerity still exists. I felt it in brief moments, in a sculpture that carried grief quietly, in a painting that seemed to breathe and ancient woven masterpieces that was hard not to touch.

Art isn’t meant to serve power. It’s meant to awaken it, in us.

That’s what platforms like Working Arts Club and  Imaginative Reaction are about: keeping space open for the kind of art that remembers where it came from. The streets, the workshop, the soul and the kind of artists like Nick Fraser, who create not for applause or market placement, but because they have no choice.

⸻

Only 8% of UK artists come from working-class backgrounds. That statistic alone should tell us something about who gets to speak and who gets heard.Frieze was a revelation, not just in scale, but in what it revealed about what the art world values.

Thornton Dial (1928-2016) - Edel Assanti Gallery

My personal highlight of the day was stumbling across Edel Assanti Gallery, who were exhibiting work by Thornton Dial (1928–2016). The representative at the stand, generous with both his time and knowledge, began sharing the artist’s story. As he spoke, I realised he was describing almost the same journey I’ve been telling for years, that of a self-taught artist whose struggle and frustration found release through creation. Hearing Dial’s history as an outsider artist from Alabama felt like encountering a distant echo of Nick’s own path. It was grounding and quietly moving to see that voice represented at Frieze and to be reminded that art born from passion and lived experience still finds its way into the world’s largest rooms.

Thank you again to the Working Arts Club for this amazing opportunity and everything you do.