I didn't know who was supposed to be having sex with whom, and the band all looked so studiedly youthful that I left, in search of a makeover. You can get one at A Gentil Carioca's stand. The gallery is from Rio de Janeiro. Your chair awaits, along with the lights, mirrors, jars of unguents and a real makeup artist. The trouble is the makeover: the scheme, in this project by Laura Lama, is to make you look older. I told the makeup artist I'd already had the treatment and was really only 16, but I don't think she believed me. Some of the collectors wandering about look a million years old, but I don't think they've been slathered, in latex and instant-wrinkle cream either.
You age by the minute in here. One alarming sculpture, by Romanian-born Andra Ursuta, is a lifesize body cast, showing the artist as an iron-age mummy, preserved by being buried for millennia in a northern European peat bog. I notice her hi-tops are still intact. She is also covered in a copious quantity of fake, glistening semen. This is not the sort of thing one can easily overlook. Ursuta's abject sculpture is actually one of the better examples of a kind of figurative sculpture that is always with us: by turns jokey, laughable, stupid and extreme, in a frequently pointless and tiresome way.
A monstrous, trudging god (like the last man to finish a gruelling marathon) has a patch of stinging nettles growing out of his back. This is by Folkert de Jong, and it's called the New Deal. It looks like a very old deal to me.
Better is the billy-goat costume that artist Pawe? Althamer has travelled the world wearing, following the journeys of a Polish children's-book character. The goat is now taking a breather, sitting in the pose of Rodin's The Thinker, but looking a bit stunned. Elsewhere, Darren Lago has morphed Rodin's 1891 Monument to Balzac with Mickey Mouse. Why, I ask, but can't really be bothered to find out. I don't care that much. The fair is too big, and there isn't time. What collectors do with this stuff is a better question: stick it in the corner of the living room, frighten the kiddies with it?
Some of this art is for the birds. A flock of funny little bronze birds by Ugo Rondinone peck at an achingly white floor. A stuffed goose by Javier Téllez regards a little Brancusi-like tower of enormous golden eggs (this must be a metaphor about the art world); while a live hermit crab has taken a bronze cast of Brancusi's 1910 Sleeping Muse as its new home in Pierre Huyghe's aquarium, one of the better of this year's commissioned Frieze projects. This is odd and extremely beautiful. The art-encumbered crab clambers over the rocks, oblivious that the hollowed-out head it is wearing is art. Or perhaps it knows perfectly well who Brancusi is.
It is certainly a great deal more lively and lovely than Christian Jankowski's motor yacht, which punters can buy either as an expensive pleasure boat – or, for a bit more dosh, as an artwork. I find this a witless and trivial Duchampian gag. "Oh no," I imagine the proud new owner saying, "this isn't my expensive new yacht, this is an artwork for which I paid over the odds just so I can tell you about it and show off my extreme sophistication, my sense of humour and my utter lack of taste".
Bananas are in this year. I counted two, but there could be more. A stuffed chimp, teetering on a pile of heavy-duty art books reaches for one, dangling from on high in a work by Elmgreen and Dragset, and the other is spotlit, suspended on fishing line, like an indoor new moon, in a work by Urs Fischer. Work is perhaps not the word. (Neither are as good as the cameo-role banana in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, which Harold Pinter refused to act with or, rather, eat.)
More poignantly, on an otherwise empty stand, Michael Sailstorfer beams in live webcam footage from a woodland in Germany. He has painted the ground around some trees black, and the ground is slowly getting covered in fallen leaves. I keep looking, hoping to see furtive goings-on, but so far it is just a dappled autumn afternoon. In my mind, I twin this work with just about the only memorable sculpture dotted about Regent's Park. It is just a battered old domestic door, standing ajar in its frame, and remade in bronze by Gavin Turk. A door on to nothing, a passage to nowhere.
At the entrance to the fair, Scottish artist Cara Tolmie dances and whinnies, walks and talks and spins in a revolving chair. Part banshee, part kookaburra, part diva and part lecturer, Tolmie creates a daily performance that ends with a lecture, weaving a narrative about space and territory, action and language. It is funny, self-deprecating, piling layer upon layer of talk, song and movement, only to deconstruct it all at the end.
Laure Prouvost's signs dotted about give you pause. "Ideally in this room would be a busy African market," says one. Another: "The fifth floor is wonderful." Obviously, there is no fifth floor – but there is a market, stuffed with stuff.
You have to work at Frieze to get much out of it. Fairs may be the worst places in the world for looking at art, but you have to thank Frieze for giving a little shock therapy to the gallery schedules. This autumn sees more great shows than I can remember: Gerhard Richter, Tacita Dean, Pipilotti Rist, Wilhelm Sasnal.
Inside the fair, it's hard to remember the recession, but somehow gestures like Jankowski's boat begin to look obscene in the light of it, however critical his intentions. Even Pierre Huyghe's crab starts to have a decadent, underwater air. I think I'll have a banana.
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