To prove to you there’s a lot more to young&foodish than burgers, spaghetti, pizza, sandwiches and coffee I decided to devote my newest top 10 to the Frieze Art Fair at London’s Regent’s Park.

Whenever I go to art shows, which is pretty much all the time except when I’m eating, I try to empathise with the artists by playing this little game: I examine each work and, without looking at the corresponding exhibition labels, try to guess its title. I’ve become rather good at it and come up with, if not the exact title, at least something very close to it a good third of the time.

Below is a slideshow featuring my top 10 from this year’s Frieze Art Fair. After each of the 10 chosen artworks I’ve inserted a white label identifying the artist, his or her title for the work and then my informed guess as to what the artist’s title would be.

[oqeygallery id=27]

 

The zebras in Ken Okiishi‘s Frame reminded me of the famous zebra print wallpaper at Gino, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that closed last year. (If this observation has made you groan I’m sorry. Maybe there’s not that much more to me than my food obsessions).

In “Basta”, his eulogy to that legendary Italian restaurant, Gay Talese noted that Gino was “known primarily for its moderate prices, its tomato-red wallpaper printed with three hundred and fourteen leaping zebras, and its determinedly uncreative chefs”.

As it turns out Gino was the inspiration for Okiishi’s Frieze installation. The artist, who works primarily in video, performance, sculpture and photography, reproduced Gino’s famous zebra-print wallpaper upside-down on the installations walls.

“Most people under the age of 75 who actually live on the Upper East Side thought that Gino was disgusting,” writes the artist in his notes for Frame. “While I delighted as much as anyone in the dining room’s safari-in-ruins production of authenticity I always had indigestion afterward.”