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guide to frieze frieze magazine - The question over the inaugural edition of Frieze continues to be if the British interlopers would upset the Armory Show, our increasingly moribund local art fair, as New York's leading festival of contemporary art and conspicuous consumption. For your dealers and the collectors it's too soon to share with - Frieze opens on Friday following a collectors' preview on Thursday. But this is a far better fair than might have been expected the first time out, though in comparison with its old school cousin this can be a safer affair, with little grit and plenty of gloss.

This article - The best news: Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover made the right call by holding Frieze on Randall's Island, a park within the East river usually frequented only by little-league baseball players. New Yorkers have been sceptical - it is with enough contentration to have us to cross Manhattan, aside from take a ferry (or limousine) over the water. But about the island, Frieze has enough space to get a sinuous white tent, created by the young Brooklyn architectural duo SO-IL, which curves over the waterfront. The tent offers continuous vistas along the fair - handsomer than other events' gridded chicken coops, though a bit intimidating too. There are 180 galleries here, but nowhere to hide. The first Frieze art fair, for those its wealth, remains closer to its scruffy east London roots compared to old-money fairs in Basel or Maastricht. There is however no mistaking that Frieze New York is perhaps all business, and provocations from the type London audiences have learned to expect - wrecked booths, disruptive performances, installations that mock art market absurdities - usually are not in evidence. Maccarone, an often confrontational gallery, is showing a sculpture through the brothers Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen, incorporating a tree from an Alaskan island where they lived for weeks - but also a 12-metre abstract striped painting by Ann Craven, elegant but benign. Even Gavin Brown, a once reliably provocative Anglo-American dealer, has mounted a lovely but extremely safe booth, focused on seven achingly delicate paintings by Laura Owens, all linked together by way of a wooden mesh.

This article - As stated on this frieze review: The biggest galleries have taken few chances. Require a monochrome Anish Kapoor disc to decorate your third home? Grab a huge yellow one or even a a bit smaller version in tasteful bronze - otherwise just wait until you and your 1% friends meet later this spring in Hong Kong or Basel, where you can try again. It's more rewarding to invest time in the single-artist installations by younger galleries, which Sharp and Slotover have placed smack at the heart of the fair. On the list of lessons you'll learn: Ny is finished and all sorts of the cool American kids have moved to LA. At Redling Artwork, Liz Glynn has made papier-mache replicas of gold jewellery from pawn shops throughout the Capital of scotland- Angels. Money is irregular, she reminds us, and there is a market for everything.