When the international art world descended on Regent's Park on 14 October for the VIP opening of Frieze London 2026, the champagne was Ruinart, the money was new, and — unusually — the bathrooms were an artwork. In a dispatch filed from the fair's opening day, Hyperallergic describes a preview that was as much about being seen as about seeing art: one visitor had dressed to match an orange-and-black sculpture by Teresa Solar Abboud, while the fair's obligatory mirrored selfie spot took the form of Anish Kapoor's stainless-steel Green and Brandy (2026) at Kukje Gallery's booth.

Visitors also climbed aboard Theo Triantafyllidis's Feral Metaverse (Spider) (2026), the giant participatory spider sculpture and multiplayer game that won this year's Frieze London Artist Award — a soft, tactile structure that doubles as the threshold to a shared digital environment. Elsewhere, the fair offered its usual mysteries: indeterminate objects on carpeted floors that could be "works of searing socio-political commentary or discarded wrappers from someone's overpriced sandwich" — and, inevitably, "lots and lots and lots of paintings."

The fair's most original commission, though, may be the least visible. Frieze invited artist Gray Wielebinski to reimagine its public bathrooms, and the result was a series of olfactory installations — urinal cakes and toilet rim blocks engineered to diffuse a custom scent "invoking the smells of Gray Wielebinski's studio," produced by the aptly named creative studio Dean's Bottom.

The promised notes of "pencil shavings, paint, dust and sweat" proved elusive to the reporter's nose — possibly an early symptom of a fair-week cold — but the gesture earned "top marks for originality." It lands as a knowing wink at the fair's culture of luxury: a market ritual scented not with money, but with studio dust.