Frieze London diary: a Mick Jagger meeting, a movie night and punk fair style – The Art Newspaper

Movie night with Elmgreen & Dragset

Fashionistas take note! Prada Mode has staged a Frieze week occupation of the former Camden Town Hall, just down the road from the fair, in collaboration with mischievous artists Elmgreen & Dragset. The duo describe their installation The Audience as “a meditation on spectatorship in the age of image overload and attention deficit”. To this end, they have converted the former council chamber into an auditorium peopled with a smattering of eerily life-like mannequins who eat popcorn and gaze at a screen depicting a miasma of blurred images but with clearly audible sound. “We are bombarded with images so we thought let’s make a movie that is just beautiful abstract images and just listen to the dialogue where a writer says the art audience is not a real audience—[because] they only spend 30 seconds in front of an artwork—imagine trying to read a book in that time?” explain the artists. Instead, theirs is a film on a constant loop “so you will always be late for the movie, you will always be embarrassed and you just need to sit down and shut up!” Doesn’t sound like the most soothing antidote to the art world’s wandering concentration…

Michelangelo meets Mick

They nearly share a name and they both have iconic status. They are also both extremely sprightly considering their greatly advanced years. It was hard to tell who was the more excited when Mick (Jagger) met Michelangelo (Pistoletto) for the first time at the opening of Nahmad Projects’s exhibition, which intersperses 15 of Pistoletto’s new Mirror Paintings with classic Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso. The duo went on to bond further at a dinner held in the gallery with the dapper king of Arte Povera also conducting an animated conversation with the famously art loving Leonardo DiCaprio. It was the conceptual artist, rather than the actor or the rock star, who chose to post the encounter on his Instagram.

Alain Servais can rock a blazer

The Belgian collector Alain Servais stood out at the Frieze London VIP day in a blazer emblazoned with the names of some stellar British rock groups. “I bought this jacket in Milan, it’s one of a set of three by an Iranian artist,” he told us, pointing to the Sex Pistols, The Who and Black Sabbath daubed in large yellow letters on his clothing. This blazer is especially for London, added Servais, highlighting proudly the archetypal rebel mantra—“Anarchy in the UK”—splashed across the sleeve. Servais, a fixture on the art fair circuit, is never seen without a jaunty cravat and always weighs in with his robust opinions on the world (and the art market).

Tat’s a bit much: an artist’s archive of ink

The Russian performance artist Petr Davydtchenko was stopped by curious visitors at Frieze London keen to look at his distinctive tattoos, such as the word Pfizer inked across his forehead. The green-ish lettering daubed on his cranium is a protest against the actions of big pharmaceutical companies during the coronavirus pandemic. All of Davydtchenko’s tattoos—from head to foot—have been measured and photographed for an archive piece called Skin in the Game (2025), which was acquired earlier this year by A/POLITICAL, a London-based collection dedicated to radical, politically engaged art. We asked Petr if getting the tattoos hurt, but he (bravely) insists that he does not suffer for his body art. Davydtchenko is also known for surviving long periods on a diet of roadkill animals such as foxes and cats. Yummy…

On the hunt for a cooler UK

Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, is making waves with a recent comment piece in the Financial Times that bigs up London and the UK in the face of Brit bashers everywhere. In the piece, catchily entitled “Don’t move to Dubai—this is still the place to be”, Hunt insists that “given the geopolitical turmoil, the UK’s cultures and traditions will prove ever more attractive”. Especially, he adds, as “Paris sinks into a political quagmire and Berlin’s epically late trains redefine time travel”. Ouch! Britain’s brilliant cultural attractions naturally get a name check, with Hunt gushing that “this month’s Frieze London art fair will prove that, despite Brexit, we are still a cultural behemoth”.