The London Art scene: Welcome to the world's fair

London is now one of the biggest art markets in the world, and art fairs pullulate here to meet collector demand for baubles big and small. A whole week in mid-October has now been unofficially rebranded ‘Frieze Week’ after the city’s preeminent art fair, but the calendar is packed year round.

Already this year we've had a couple of major hitters. Following the classic London Art Fair in January – the original art market, held in Islington – we’ve just seen the second iteration of a brand new venture, Art14, held in Kensington’s Olympia. 

I went down to have a look. How will Art14 work in such a crowded market? After all, there there are fairs for affordable art, Latin American art, kinetic art – you name it. Okay, Frieze remains pre-eminent although there are plentiful grumbles about the cost (a handsome £32 for visitors) and the looming sense that it’s a huge airport lounge for international sophisticates. Other relative newbies include Pad London, a splash of Paris in Mayfair, which makes you feel as if you’re in a posh apartment in the 16th. Masterpiece in Chelsea is where you go to stand and gawp at impossible riches. 

So how does Art14 differ? Well, it’s cheaper than Frieze (£18) and there are decent London galleries, such as Bankside’s Purdy Hicks Gallery, that you don’t see at Frieze, which is now very cool, shiny and exclusive indeed. 

But another important thing is obvious. This is a global fair. There’s Pearl Lam from Singapore and galleries from all previously-neglected points of the compass, including Hungary, China, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey. So Art14 invites the world, which is astute, as the collecting energy at the Tate as well as most large public museums is concentrating on the non-Western European, non-US world. There’s a freshness of outlook – and also a new market for collectors tired of the shrivelled husk that is the orthodox contemporary art world.

As I walked along Art14's stalls, beneath Olympica’s rather grand Victorian glass and steel roof, I thought that Art14 is more manageable and friendlier than Frieze and also cheaper. A few stalls even have price tags – unheard of at the top-end events. The brochure tells you there will be a range of art from ‘£500 to £500,000’ and there’s definitely a more democratic, less oligarchic feeling afoot. 

Amid the stands are installations, some of which are stunning. The soaring Benin-born artist Romauld Hazoume’s Rat Singer: Second Only to God! – an installation of old jerry cans as a sinking ship – stood in pole position: a conceptual ‘Raft of the Medusa’ for the oil age. Cameron Platter from South Africa’s Advertising Tombstone Wall, a carved Jacaranda tree reconfigured as a wall with messages upon it, made waspish comment on Africa’s market transition; and from China, Zhao Zhao’s Waterfall, made of paraffin and red wax, had a queasy quality that lured me closer. (Shown by Berlin and Beijing’s Alexander Ochs Gallery, it sold at the fair for €90,000.) I also enjoyed a lot of the galleries, as the market buzzed around me, stopping at Pakistan’s Art Chowk gallery, where Atif Khan’s hand-stamped flies converge around a vortex.  As a riposte to the rich people snapping up Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, it seemed apposite.