The Making of the Frieze Art Fairs

Frieze Art Fair in Photos

Frieze co-founders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover are ready to tackle new territory

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Sharp and Slotover Linda Nylind/Frieze …

The James Cohan presentation at Frieze New York last year Marco Scozzaro …

The Helly Nahmad booth, staged as a collector’s apartment, at Frieze Masters Linda Nylind/Frieze …

Frieze magazine’s first issue in 1991 Courtesy of Frieze …

The entrance of Frieze Masters Linda Nylind/Frieze …

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LIKE FAMILIAR STATUARY, the figures of Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover—fiercely frizzy hair and boyish mien, respectively—have greeted pilgrims at the entrance of the Frieze Art Fair every year since the event’s start in London, back in 2003. As the fair’s founders, the brainy and erudite pair have raised the art of the meet-and-greet to the level of afternoon tea with the queen. In many people’s eyes, it is their uncommon commitment to connoisseurship that at least in part explains their success; what started out as a scrappy post-university publishing adventure is now an umbrella for two art magazines of record—in English and German—as well as three fairs of international renown spread between New York and London. Inasmuch as art fairs today are no longer the exclusive stomping ground of the private-jet-owning one percent but also for the curious plenty, Frieze has played perhaps the biggest role in that shift. On the eve of this month’s Frieze New York—the final fair for which they will serve as directors—the two are setting their sights on new ventures.

According to institutional lore, Slotover and Sharp met at a bar mitzvah in London—where they both grew up—at the age of 12. They crossed paths again at Oxford, where they each dabbled in writing and editing for school papers. After graduation, they launched a magazine buoyed by an iconoclastic moment in contemporary art that would later be christened the epoch of the Young British Artists, or YBAs (these were the beginnings of Damien Hirst’s sharks preserved in formaldehyde and Tracey Emin’s smelly refuse-laden bed). “It was absolutely electric,” says Slotover, 46. “You couldn’t get away from the feeling that something was happening in London, and though we really didn’t know anything about art or magazines, we just knew we had to respond to it,” adds Sharp, 46, who is both punishingly serious and disarmingly down to earth (like the late Steve Jobs, she heroically sticks to jeans, regardless of the occasion). 

Frieze magazine’s pilot issue, handsomely designed by fellow co-founder Tom Gidley (he left in 2000 to pursue his own artwork), boasted a butterfly by Hirst on its cover and featured a conversation between the artist and the late Welsh art critic Stuart Morgan on “life and death.” Back then, the editorial trio simply knocked on the doors of their favorite writers—including prominent cultural critics like Hilton Als, Peter Schjeldahl and Lynne Tillman—almost always managing to seduce them into contributing. “We were kids!” says Sharp. “Maybe people were charmed by that.” The gallerist Gavin Brown served as the magazine’s first U.S. editor, and later, the artist Collier Schorr took over that role. Frieze swiftly became “the other Artforum,” a foil to the then-three-decade-old establishment arts publication.

And yet, 12 years into the project and having improbably devised a profitable print magazine, Sharp and Slotover craved a new set of challenges. By then, Sharp was living and working from New York, while Slotover remained in London (their transatlantic phone calls took up at least half of most days). “The fair became the thing that reanimated our relationship,” Sharp says now. 

The first Frieze Art Fair opened with abundant brouhaha in October 2003 in London’s leafy Regent’s Park. Housed in an elegant cathedral-like tent designed by the architect David Adjaye, it was hailed by critics for its quality and cosmopolitanism. London in the early 2000s was vying with New York as a financial center and was rife with new and old money, as well as an atmosphere of can-do-ism that expressed itself in the ascendance of a new entrepreneurial class. New restaurants (no more bland English mush!), art galleries, social clubs and even the opening of the hulking Tate Modern in a retired power station signaled a sea change in the city’s cultural life. The Frieze Art Fair seemed to be cut from the same cloth. In that first outing, tickets sold out daily with long lines to get in, despite the dreary London rain. “It felt like every single creative person was there,” MoMA curator Stuart Comer recently told me. “Between the quality of the art and the intellectual ambition of the programming and commissions, it was clear that the fair was going to cause a seismic shift across the art world.”

At a time when art fairs seem to have popped up everywhere from Buenos Aires to Hong Kong, groaning about their ubiquity and crass commercialism has become easy conversation filler at cocktail parties. Still, amid the requisite eye rolls, Frieze has proven to be innovative. It was the first fair, for example, to put public talks and unconventional public art commissions at the center of its agenda. Last year’s New York fair included appearances by the director of the Academy Award–nominated documentary The Act of Killing and members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot, recently released from a Russian prison—neither of which qualifies as breezy art fair banter. 

Sharp and Slotover also expressed an early commitment to the sort of work that art historians like to file under the cumbersome rubric of “relational aesthetics.” In the name of this socially engaged art, past iterations of Frieze have witnessed: celebrities serving sausage in homage to dead sausage-loving artists; a young woman calmly reading a Philip Pullman novel alongside a lump of her own excrement; or a performance by a troupe of disabled actors. While a lot of this might feel like having your cake and eating it, too (many of the non-commercial projects indulge in knowing jabs about the problems of the art world), it still makes other fairs’ programming look like an afterthought. “We try to tread that fine line between doing something that can survive as a business but that has a cultural component as well,” says Slotover. “The balance is tricky, but without it, we just wouldn’t stay interested.” (The bulk of Frieze’s profits are derived from selling space to galleries at the fair.)

In 2012, Sharp and Slotover ventured into new territory again with the launch of Frieze Masters in London, a fair that spans ancient to modern art. Masters has included everything from the re-creation of a collector’s art- and book-laden apartment frozen in 1968 Paris to a series of intricate drawings inscribed in accountants’ ledger books by members of Plains Indians tribes in the decades before 1900. In May of 2012 a new fair also launched in New York City. Set on Randall’s Island—a place hitherto known only to parents of soccer-playing children and ardent fans of Cirque du Soleil—Frieze New York’s demi-aquatic location alone was enough to set it apart from your standard cultural excursion. Says the sagely cantankerous New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz: “The atmospherics are different. I can smell water. The space feels open, the place has a kind of cool-kids vibe, but in a good way. And it’s the one fair that I haven’t yet had a nervous breakdown at.”

For the New York iteration, Sharp and Slotover brought on SO-IL, an architecture firm known for its deceptively lo-fi approach. The airy tent it designed, which stretches the length of three football fields, makes moving around a pleasure rather than a claustrophobic, eye-glazing chore. An eclectic selection of restaurants—from haute to affordable—continues to be a draw. (Both Sharp and Slotover have outsize passions for food and have consistently recruited concession stands from the likes of Roberta’s pizza in New York or Hix in London.) And of course, there is an annual roster of diverse artist projects commissioned by Italian curator Cecilia Alemani, including this year’s re-creation of a vast labyrinth designed by the Fluxus artist George Maciunas in 1976.

And so, one might wonder, with things going so well, why on earth would Sharp and Slotover relinquish their roles? “It’s time for new ideas and new blood,” Slotover says (the pair do retain ownership of the endeavor). Victoria Siddall, a 10-year veteran of the organization, has been tapped to helm the fairs alongside artistic directors Jo Stella-Sawicka and Abby Bangser. But even as Sharp and Slotover face the end of their run as directors, there’s been little thumb twiddling; they say that they’ve been studying diverse potential projects, about which they remain tight-lipped. Are they art related? “We can’t tell,” Sharp says. What about entertainment? “It’s too early to say,” says Slotover, adding: “You know, we actually like starting things. It turns out that’s what we’re best at.”