FRIEZE LOS ANGELES
Late February · Santa Monica Airport · Four Days · Since 2019
Frieze Los Angeles is four days at the end of February and the youngest fair on this calendar. A hundred galleries from some two dozen countries, roughly half of them from Los Angeles itself.
Thirty thousand people come. What the fair has done to the city in seven years is more interesting than its size.
The Backlot
The first two editions, in 2019 and 2020, were held on the Paramount backlot.
Which is to say: an art fair staged inside a false New York, on streets built to be photographed rather than lived in, in a city whose principal industry is the manufacture of convincing illusions. The galleries took a tent, and the curated projects were placed among brownstones and a financial district that do not exist.
Nobody has arranged anything quite like it since, and the fair has been looking for a home ever since it left.
The 2021 edition was cancelled. A plan to spread it across historic Los Angeles houses proved impossible to execute. In 2022 it took a vacant lot beside the Beverly Hilton. In 2023 it moved to Santa Monica Airport, where it has stayed, in a marquee pitched on the car park that holds an antiques market on alternate Sundays.
The airport is due to close before the end of the decade, so the fair will move again.
The Effect
Los Angeles had artists before Frieze. What it did not have was the galleries.
In the years after the fair arrived, Hauser and Wirth, David Zwirner, Pace, Lisson and Perrotin all opened or enlarged Los Angeles premises. A city that had exported its artists to New York for fifty years stopped having to.
That is the argument for the fair, and it is a strong one. Four days a year of tents on an airfield turned out to be enough to move where the market sits.
What to Know
Half the galleries are local. That is the point of coming. The Los Angeles rooms show work that does not travel, and the visiting galleries bring their Californian artists.
Tickets are sold online only and they sell out.
The fair is one part of the week. The museums, the galleries in Hollywood and downtown, and several private collections all open around it, and some of the best things happen away from the airfield.
February in Los Angeles is the good month. Seventy degrees and the hills are green, which they are not in August.
The mistake is treating it as Frieze London in the sun. It is a younger and rougher fair with more local work in it, and that is the reason to go rather than a failing.
The Court
Frieze Los Angeles is not the Court’s own. Preview passes, introductions to galleries and access to private collections around the city are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.
