One Autumn day, back in the early 1990s, I met a fresh-faced, enthusiastic young editor of a new arts magazine called Matthew Slotover. We were both young hacks trying to make it big in the media. His passion was arts journalism. Mine was political investigative journalism. At the time I thought politics was going to remain far more important than the arts so I shied away from his new magazine.

So what happened? Politics imploded whereas the arts seem to have taken over the world. Slotover found his place at the epicenter of the artsquake. He is a co-publishing director of Frieze arts magazine and a co-director of the annual Frieze Art Fair, an annual pop up home to 173 art galleries from all over the world as well as host to satellite art, talks, film and music events. The event has even got ‘improved financial stability’ according to Slotover, despite the global recession. Frieze actions sold 94m UK pounds worth of art this year.  Alongside Charles Saatchi and Damian Hirst, Slotover and his business partner Amanda Sharp are the British modern art establishment.

This year (14-17 October), the Frieze Art Fair was bigger and more packed, varied and international than before. A few years ago I was non-plussed by the art. This time you felt the world and all its art ideas had landed in Frieze’s big tent in Regent’s Park as Japanese artists displayed works alongside new, emerging galleries from Eastern Europe and Latin America and the regulars from London, New York and Moscow. There was even some overtly political art.

The first exhibit I had to jostle with the crowds to see was a giant mirror by Jeppe Hein, a Danish artist based in Berlin. As the mirror wobbled indefinitely, we all stared at our shaking reflections a man was filming us, holding his camera very steady. Were we part of the art work’s video installation? Opposite, London’s Lisson Gallery showed Anish Kapoor’s latest offering, a modest (by his standards) four foot high, wine red, perspex tuba-shaped object with parts of the polished surface glittering beneath the surface which made it appear undulating even though it was smooth. It was entitled ‘Untitled’ (2010) so I asked a random 8-year old boy what he thought it should be called. ‘A slide,’ he said.

Mike Nelson’s installation, an old wooden box scratched with ‘Torino 2001’ and surrounded by momento mori including a small skull object, a jar containing stubbed-out cigars and old horse shoes, was also ‘Untitled’ (2009). Olafur Eliasson’s work also seemingly untitled as ‘Untitled Sphere (working title)’ (2010) was a multi-sided, giant mirrored covered object inside which you could see your own yellow-hued image reflected back thanks to a bright yellow beaming bulb reflected by the mirrors inside. There was the work of Jonas Burgert from Produzenten Galerie, Hamburg, whose title was ‘no title’. So what was it about? Who knows but it was spectacular. Burgert had painted a large canvas showing a small monkey and other gremlin-type characters with bizarre pantomime costumes. On the right a whole load of them were depicted shooting out of a dark wall like some kind of nightmare, jack-in-the box gone wrong. It drew a crowd. Only one bare white wall (untitled) existed in the venue (somebody forgot to come?), a welcome oasis from the intense experience of looking at a massive display of art almost on top of and under other art.

Back to the other kind of titled stuff. Tomas Saraceno presented his ‘Hydrogen Cloud Explosion (working title)’ (2010) in the New York Tanya Bonakdar gallery stand. It drew a lot of attention, looking like a molecular model he’d stolen from a chemistry lab. His six foot long hanging structure was made of colourless perspex. Inside were thin black threads zooming out in all kinds of directions.  Meanwhile his black and white 156 x 22 cm-sized photograph of a similar object looked more like a plan for a new social networking site. It’s title? It didn’t have one. At least it used to have one – or perhaps the wrong one - but a title had been covered over with white stickers. I could just make it out: ‘Baltic web photo,’ (2010).

At the north end of the art fair there were several posters promoting the Save The Arts campaign in response to the proposed cuts in government arts funding. This was the political wing of the fair. Nearby were the works displayed by The Regina gallery in Moscow and London. These included a painting about gangsters showing a guy lying down with an erect penis with a head saying ‘Russia’ and wearing a cap saying ‘capitalism.’ I found it boring and obvious. Much more compelling was a grainy looking image of a tramp by Semyon Faibisovich. The work called ‘Tramp from the cycle’ (2009) was a close-up portrait, with the tramp collapsed on the ground looking so heavy, thick lipped and defeated (and perhaps drunk), melting in to the ground as if he would never get up again. Nearby was Sergey Bratkov’s ‘Mickey Mouse’ from a series of photos called ‘Juvenille Detention’ (2001). It portrayed a defiant looking young boy wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, one hand poking out from a plastered arm, a lit cigarette in his mouth. In other stand at the opposite end of the fair for the New York Paul Kasmin Gallery there was also an image of a child smoking. Nir Hod’s painting of a petulant, rich looking boy holding a lit cigarette was called ‘Genius “Oscar”’ (2010). Some kids grow up too quick.

‘Mickey Mouse’ from a series of photos called ‘Juvenille Detention’ (2001) by Sergey Bratkov

‘Genius “Oscar”’ (2010), by Nir Hod

At the Max Wigram Gallery (London) stand, they were showing the work of French artist Marine Hugonnier called ‘Art for Modern Architecture – Die Welt-Berlin Wall’ (2010). Her series of six, framed front pages of Die Welt newspaper comprised events from 1961 to 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the front pages, brightly coloured, squares of plastic were stuck on them. Hugonier is inspired by the painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly who claimed the purpose of painting is to serve Modernist architecture, her dealer told me. This is why Hugonier imports abstract, modernist forms on to her work. Her other works include the same application works about the fall of the Soviet Union and the election of Margaret Thatcher. Why does she use old newspapers? ‘It depicts the restraint of information,’ said the dealer. 

Another artist has found an original way of funding his work and making a political statement about global money markets at the same time. Lourival Cuquinha showed his flag made of money (untitled) at the A.Gentil Carioca stand (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). British five and ten pound bank notes worth 1000 UK pounds were stitched together as a flag. It wafted gently in the breeze created by all the Frieze fair attendees floating by. Cuquinha sold shares in the piece to investors. When the flag was sold to a private collector for 17000 UK pounds at auction, the investors were paid interest.

My favourite works were by Marc Quinn, a British artist. His life size bronze statue of a man in an Adidas tracksuit holding a skull upside down, in the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Salzburg, Paris) stand had a hypnotic effect. The statue’s robotic, angelic face was unnaturally smooth. The tracksuit’s folds looked deceptively real. Rainbow affects on the metal in places left an uneasy feeling that the statue wasn’t simply the product of metal casting but was perhaps a dormant machine, with an electronic life of its own. The skull evoked Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Quinn had titled the piece ‘A moment of clarity’ (2010). Would it turn itself on and suddenly start reciting from the Bard?

The artist has also fashioned a life size bronze bust of Kate Moss and a frozen head made of blood. His dealer showed me his catalogue including his painted, beautifully coloured, supernatural looking human eye iris. On other large canvasses at the fair Quinn’s flowers looked like they were made digitally using Photoshop. On closer inspection were painted.

Quinn’s work isn’t political. His artistic power lies in the mesmerising effect of his art to evoke different kinds of feelings and ideas that snatches the senses and draws you in. In the case of the ‘A moment of clarity’ statute, it would have worked equally well even without a title.