Did you go to Frieze this year? No, me neither. The relationship between art and money always makes me a bit queasy, so I was content to pass on the chance to walk round several pavilions full of dealers talking twaddle, while calculating their percentage. (Actually that might be a good collective noun for them: a percentage of dealers.) Anyway, the art was free to appreciate - and I’m told, much better - round the corner at One Marylebone, opposite Great Portland Street tube, a former church where any middlemen were keeping a very low profile.
What a terrible name for such a beautiful building And why lose the association with the Holy Trinity, to whom this treasure by Sir John Soane was originally dedicated? It really would have been more appropriate to keep the link, considering the religious nature of so many of the works on show.
The ones that have been getting all the news coverage are Paul Fryer’s crucified ape and his black Christ in an electric chair, but there were Biblical references all over the shop. And why not? Christianity has been a strong thread in Western art - if not a rope - since about the fourth century AD, and these works were less boundary breaking than part of that great tradition. Actually, I spoke to Fryer yesterday evening (Thursday), and congratulated him on his contribution. ‘And now,’ I said, ‘I’m off to see the real thing, instead of your reflections on it.’
I refer, of course, to the relics of Saint Therese of Lisieux, which made Westminster Cathedral their latest stop this week. And damn me, but they’d moved on before I got there, and I’d missed a spectacle so much greater than Frieze.
Now don’t get me wrong. I hold Saint T in as much regard as any other Catholic. I love the way so many of our places of worship display a statue of this 19th century pin-up for closed-order nuns. But you can see saints’ bones cased in gold and jewels in chapels and cathedrals all over the Europe. No, what I wished I’d been present for was the full-on frenzy of a horde of Filipinos when presented with an object of veneration.
I happened to be in Our Lady of Victories on Ken High Street a few years back, when the Madonna of Antipolo made a stop on her world tour, and the place was mayhem: thousands of Filipinos with video cameras were pushing, shouting, praising this statue. You would have thought the real one had dropped in. (The mother of Jesus, I mean, not the singer.) It must have been like that when the great Renaissance painters paraded their works through Florence on their way to the Duomo.
They say that art galleries are the new cathedrals of this Godless age. But until I see such a fuss over an installation by Damien Hirst, I reckon there’s still plenty of power left in that old-time religion. And as for art dealers, maybe they should all be cleared from the temple precincts - like the moneychangers before them…
