Frieze review – you’ll see more avant garde wonders in the Bake Off tent

Naked people climb out of the earth and run around waving their arms and screaming, while someone with a bird’s head and wings plays the bagpipes. It’s my favourite artwork at this year’s Frieze but don’t go looking for this wildly imaginative outrage among the heaps of contemporary art at Frieze London. It’s a painting by a 16th-century follower of Hieronymus Bosch and is on view at Frieze Masters, the posher tent on the other side of Regent’s Park.

I’m sorry to say I was bored rigid in Frieze London. Many people attend, I imagine, hoping to be informed and excited by the newest, coolest art, but you’ll see more genuinely avant garde wonders in the Bake Off tent. There are endless paintings, none of which are much good, interspersed with photographs which tend to be a little better. The first thing here that held me at all was a two-metre-tall, inkjet print by Wolfgang Tillmans called Paul, nude, golf ball in which the naked Paul has his elbows on the floor and his close-cropped head bowed between them in apparent despair, while the white ball beside him eerily mirrors the pale flesh of his bony back. But it’s not new – it dates from 1994.

And, oh Lord, those paintings. There seem to be millions of them. And an elegant white marquee full of gallery booths along endless white corridors is a ghastly way of showing them, a dreadful way of seeing. It’s not as rewarding as visiting galleries which can be interesting spaces. Here, everything is crammed in, like a huge shop – the Selfridges of art.

Frieze, it is claimed, defines the new and finds the stars of tomorrow. But it’s obvious that it really serves the needs of sellers and the tastes of a certain kind of extremely wealthy consumer. This is most apparent on VIP day when I enter along with a host of tech bros, hedge-fund managers, retired hedge-fund managers, their children, and – is that George Osborne? – who were actually here to buy this stuff. At Frieze Masters, I was about to ask the price of an Anselm Kiefer work, matted vegetation clogging its surface, when an elderly couple beat me to it. They were genuinely interested in purchasing. The price was just shy of a million quid.

Things you can put on your wall are still the most collectible art. At Frieze Masters, you will find works by established modern “masters”, many of whom are deceased: a series of stained, graffiti-laden visual poems by Cy Twombly, a grey, bleak nude by Leon Kossoff. But at the contemporary fair, some of it is jumble sale standard. At Los Angeles’ Night Gallery booth, Wanda Koop’s Radiance-Together depicts two candles burning side by side in a blue and purple setting. Aw, cute. Who on earth would take this seriously? Another of its artists, Andy Woll, shows a row of lazily brushed mountain views that are just as vacuous. Meanwhile, at the appropriately named Grimm Gallery, Rosalind Nashashibi – better known for her films – exhibits a silly painting of lovers between flowery borders.

Now here’s something different – a row of white mineral-like growths, eerily lovely, enigmatically organic: they’re Helen Chadwick’s Piss Flowers, a chance to own examples of a modern classic by this tremendous artist who died in 1996. Why is she not over in Frieze Masters? And at the back of the Edel Assanti booth is Lonnie Holley’s assemblage of a water tap on a rusty pipe entwined with wire and two green bottles on a rough wooden plinth. It has the raw tang of real life. Holley, a musician and artist from Birmingham, Alabama who held me spellbound a couple of years ago when he showed how he can create beauty from a random piece of wire, is a true American great who stands out in this blandfest.

So do Tracey Emin, Waqas Khan, Do Ho Suh, Catherine Opie and Zanele Muholi – but in all honesty the success rate at Frieze London is about one in 10. That’s far too low for an event claiming to define the artistic zeitgeist.

Over at Frieze Masters, you’ve got the best certificate of quality there is: time. If something has value after 50, 500, or 68,000,000 years, it’s probably good. That 68m years is no exaggeration for here on sale is a triple-horned, fossilised Triceratops skull. Is this really going to end up as decoration in some rich dude’s house?

Let’s get it in perspective. To call this head “museum quality” is an understatement. The Natural History Museum does not own a Triceratops fossil of this perfection. Palaeontologists, as the Guardian recently reported, are worried that the fashion for dinosaur specimens among the ultra-rich is inflating prices and locking out museums. There are several such marvels being sold here.

Frieze Masters is more visually exciting than Frieze London. It’s fruitier, stranger. You can buy armour, silverware, Arabian carpets, the stuff a decadent aesthete might have surrounded themselves with in 1896. It makes you realise how conformist the contemporary fair is. At Frieze Masters, you can indulge your most perverse tastes – there are loads of sleazy, 19th-century nudes.

But if it is more interesting, it is also more disgusting. Stalls fetishise objects from the past, ripping them out of context to display them as brightly lit gewgaws: a manuscript page cut from its codex, a face mask off an ancient Egyptian coffin, a stone head of a priest from 2nd century AD Palmyra. These things belong in museums, but here they all are in the isolating spotlight of luxury and money.

This is a festival of capitalism run amok. I could say jokingly you might buy this or that but you won’t, unless you are a squillionaire, nor will I. What was it Andy Burnham was saying about the tyranny of neoliberalism? Here it distorts art in a delirious orgy of commodification.

The Colnaghi booth could have been designed as a Marxist exposé of the art market. African wooden carvings stand in front of a kitsch 1920 nude by Giacomo Grosso. The lavish view of the model’s bum as she lies on silks and the fact that she’s wearing high heels make it comically clear this is finely painted soft porn. The African art, made for religious purposes, is reduced to decor in front of this commodified body. John Berger, the radical critic who saw nude paintings and other forms of commodified art as playthings of western capitalism, might have said: told you so.