72H IN LONDON

Shortly before PIN–UP hit Paris to celebrate Barbara Chase-Riboud, contributor David Lê landed in London for 72 hours to take in the kick-off to this fall’s art-world carousel: Frieze London and all its attendant shenanigans. Barely two weeks later, it already feels like a blur. Follow him on an action-packed but thoughtful whirl around London.

DAY 1

I’m jetlagged, so the day begins with lunch: it’s hosted by the artist George Rouy, part of a new series of artist talks that the EDITION hotels is launching called EDITION Table. The lunch is held in Berners Tavern — the restaurant in the hotel’s opulent 19th-century grand room, with double-height ceilings and, appropriately for the week, an ornate plaster figural frieze. George has just opened a major solo show at Hauser & Wirth in New York; he’ll head to Paris right after lunch for the next presentation of his work. The event has been organized with The Cultivist (highbrow cultural concierges), and George has had a hand in the event design — the tables are decked with floral arrangements inspired by the Dutch masters, reminders of both bourgeois opulence and the inevitability of death. They’re very nice, and they set the scene for the talk that follows: George has brought the sociologist Nikolaj Schultz, who frames his paintings in terms of environmental destruction and, in particular, the wildfires that have beset Europe this summer.

After the talk I tell George that I don’t really buy that his paintings are about that — his figures inhabit a kind of pictorial non-space that seems removed from the reality of environmental destruction. George tells me he has work in the pipeline that has a more direct relationship with the theme. The fires have been on his mind. I’m seated with Andrea Franchini, EDITION’s cultural impresario, who tells me what’s on tap for table series: Perrotin for Art Week Tokyo, Doron Langberg in New York, Creative Time’s sandcastle competition for Miami. On my right is James Haldane, editor of Sotheby’s Magazine, who confirms that I should take as many of the napkins (custom-printed with one of George’s paintings) as I can: they’re more valuable as a set. Drunk, I leave my hoard behind, then circle back to find the dining room cleared. A PA grudgingly gives me two from a box.

That afternoon, it is unseasonably warm in London, and I head out to Herald St. Gallery’s Museum Street location. They are showing British Museum — paintings, photographs, and an installation by the New York artist Esteban Jefferson. The show extends what has become Jefferson’s signature: semi-realist depictions of Neoclassical 19th-century spaces and objects portrayed alongside the machines and people that now keep them company. The work is often about race — the spectral pallor of a Beaux-Arts monument and the vivid graffiti that now mars it, or, as in British Museum, the electric heaters and fans stationed next to the British Museum’s looted booty (Jefferson has traded Neoclassicism for the real deal). It is a show about empire that is beautiful in part because of this looting, and it frames this beauty as crime scene evidence.

I then head to see another show, Grief is a woven basket but you already knew that didn’t you, by Hardy Hill, presented by CASSIUS&Co. inside Sotheran’s Athenaeum (an antiquarian bookshop founded in 1761). Hill is showing scenes of psychosexual menace and attraction in his finely wrought drawings/prints (he draws on a transparent medium and then uses those drawings to make photograms; the final image leaves his delicate linework in white against a field of perfect black). I talk with the gallerist Fraser Brough about how Hill’s aggression toward the gay male ideal embodied by his six-packed doofuses seems easier for him to acknowledge than his own attraction to those same doofuses. The push-pull of his conflict is in the images, and it’s why they are so good. Where his libido finds a fetish object — a car, a lamp — and dispenses with the figure altogether, his work is most interesting to me: the tension is still there but we have dispensed with sex, at least in any ordinary sense.

DAY 2

The next morning, I meet Mike Eckhaus of Eckhaus Latta and Peter Currie of Galerie Buchholz for lunch before we head to Frieze, which is held in a (very big) tent in Regent’s Park. Fairs are, truth be told, an impossible design challenge — they take two of fine art’s primary selling points, rarity and permanence, and offer instead overabundance and transience. I like them for that reason: you can see how the best minds in the art world aim to solve a design problem that can’t be solved. One solution is simply to decamp (everything looks good in the Grand Palais); others aim for set design — a floor treatment, a wall color. The only workable solution, in my eyes, is to accept the poverty of the medium (“poverty” being an odd word choice for what is a premier venue for high-net-worth consumption) and let the works on display do the heavy lifting. Mike describes the fair, accurately, I think, in fashion terms: “It’s like if everyone in fashion week decided to show at the exact same time.” Despite this, I hear that sales are going well.

Dinner is at Impala. It’s a celebration of Acne Studios’ capsule collection with fashion designer Hussein Chalayan. Acne Studios co-founder Jonny Johansson explains in his toast that the capsule is less a collaboration than homage; Chalayan’s deconstructed collections from the early 2000s made a lasting impression on Johansson, and now Acne has resurrected some of those pieces in its own denim palette. Chalayan, currently a professor in Berlin, described himself as “out of the fashion game,” but he seemed touched to have been brought back into the fold by Acne. I was seated with editors from Dezeen and The World of Interiors, Adam Lezzi, who works on Acne’s PR in London, Selvi May Akyildiz, director of Frieze’s No. 9 Cork Street gallery, and Kira Freije, an artist who’s been shortlisted for the Turner Prize this year. Kira explains that the shortlisted artists’ exhibition has been mounted at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, in line with Tate’s effort to reach outside the London bubble. The winner will be announced in December. Kira has my vote.

I have to leave dinner early to catch the tail end of Valeria Napoleone’s celebration of 30 years of collecting art made by women. She is hosting the event in her museum-like home — an improbably modern interior within a late-Victorian brick townhouse. I’m handed a glass of wine from a tray by an actual butler in white gloves. A stranger notices the Olympus mju I’ve been taking snapshots with: he is Aron Mörel, photobook publisher. He tells me he’s about to publish a book of Thomas Ruff’s portraits before his partner pulls him away — it can be difficult to make an exit. I follow shortly behind them, heading to meet Jed Moch of Amity, Mike, and Peter at Maureen Paley’s party on the Thames. Before I pack it in for the night, a friend of Peter’s mentions that Gagosian went all out on the installation budget for their Magritte show designed by Alex Da Corte.

DAY 3

I’m at Gagosian. There is a line out the door and a stanchion to keep the Magritte lovers in order. After about 15 minutes, I’m inside: the set design offers a subtle surrealism. One room has an enormous plinth in the same finish as the wooden floor below it; another room repeats the massive plinth in brick. The walls are paneled in swagged fabric: the effect is theatrical, a little cartoony. It looks expensive.

I head over to the Royal Academy to see Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, the first major retrospective of the Victorian artist’s work in more than 50 years. Dadd rendered his extravagant fantasies in precise detail; he was also psychotic and spent more than 40 years in asylums. His portraits of his doctors are, in some respects, more eerie than the supernatural figures he rendered. He was a progenitor of what I call “loser art” — the art born of doodles in a Trapper Keeper that depicts, say, an elf smoking a blunt on a toadstool on one page and the Predator on the next. The aim is always a kind of pictorial exactitude of fantasy cliché. Dadd was a master, however, and I’m glad that the pendulum swinging back toward figuration has allowed us to revisit his work.

I end my London trip with one last stop: Tate Britain. It is a pleasing combination of frilly 19th-century pomp and beat-up 2010s municipal architecture. Entry is free, which is a shock coming from New York. The collection is poster-worthy — I see Hockney’s A Bigger Splash and then every single Turner. The curators really telegraph his importance as a proto-Modernist by hanging a Rothko beside his works. I find myself drawn back twice to the room of Francis Bacon’s paintings hung beside Henry Moore’s sculpture. They are elegant and psychologically dense and very chic. Bacon was, of course, Irish, but he was a Londoner too. As I prepare to gather my things and head to the airport, I sit briefly in this room. It has been a whirlwind, but in the clear light of the Tate, I find myself wondering what might one day migrate from the fair to the museum, surviving the acid bath of history to sit, finally, sphinx-like in the Tate, looking back at transients like me.