Artists descend as Regent's Park Friezes over

Frieze Art Fair – the 21st century’s answer to the Field of the Cloth of Gold – pitched up in Regent’s Park last week for its ninth year. Drawing galleries from not just the major art hubs but from the world over, they come to present the best of their wares – a shopping opportunity for a (predominantly Russian) few, for the rest of us, a chance to bask in an abundance of the foremost in contemporary art.

It’s the meeting of diverse minds that makes Frieze unique. Individual galleries bring their own eclectic collections, adding to the broader tapestry of the occasion. From the irreverent humour of Elmgreen & Dragset’s life-like baby asleep in its cot outside a hotel room door (complete with “do not disturb” sign hanging from the handle) to the more cynical humour of Michael St John’s Bathroom Wall Stall, a collage of corporate distaste and pop culture (scrawled with an unintentionally Frankie Boyle-esque ‘haunted pussy’), Freize touches every shade in the spectrum. And even beyond into the darker extreme, the pure cynicism of Andra Ursuta’s deflated, semen-spattered, Crush, cripplingly detailed complete with wispy pubes has a fascinating gloom that makes it hard to look away from.

If that could be described as sublime, then Takeshi Murata’s psychedelic Popeye Zoetrope was certainly ridiculous. His acid-trip trompe l’oeil of tens of Day-Glo Popeye figurines spinning in a box of dimensions that shift as you view it from different angles was about asclose as the art world gets to legal LSD. Slightly less colourful was Rashid Rana’s mosaic of a busy South Asian junction made up entirely of postage stamp-sized monochrome pictures of itself at different times of day. The notion of small snapshots, moments in time, building to create a deeper, inherent story indulged the latent physicist in me.

Taking a step back from the works themselves, it’s intriguing to observe the personalities of the different pop-up galleries, and more so the trends in taste between nationalities. Contributors from London and New York dominate and collectively illustrate the differences in artistic palate either side of the pond.

The Modern Institute of Glasgow presented a selection of Jeremy Deller’s reverential posters that combined punchy Carmen Miranda colours with a clean-cut, quintessentially British design, in homage to Keith Moon, Paul Gascoigne and the Happy Mondays, amongst others.

The whole affair is something for the eyes to savour, much sweeter than the sum of its parts, that stretches well beyond just the installations. For the moments when bouts of Stendahl’s kick in, the array of edible treats that awaits is sure to bring even the most weary of gallery-trawler round (Curator Sarah McCrory on the topic of whether she had her eye on anything: “a nice lunch at Hix”) and in the unlikely event you find nothing to your tastes, the people-watching justifies the entry fee alone.

For the few hours I pounded the Frieze floor, I wouldn’t have guessed that we were waist-deep in a recession, except possibly for Michael Landy’s contraption that shreds your credit cards and gives you a felt-pen spirograph in return. It’s a lavish spectacle that offers the chance to bathe in the works of those who will no doubt fill the art history textbooks of the near future. Regrettably, if you’re reading this, the Frieze tent will have been packed up for this year and the gallerists will back flown off back to their respective corners of the globe. I realize it’s all very well saying this now, but do bear Frieze in mind this time next year. Whether an art-fan, anthropologist or occasional celeb-spotter, Frieze, like hijacking a supermarket trolley, is just one of those things that all of us should do at least once.