There’s an air of anticipation as you come out Regents Park tube station and cross over with the crowd towards the Frieze art fair.

But it’s not hard to find your way from there. As soon as you see the entrance, looming ahead like a plywood Brandenburg Gate, you know that this is the big one before you even step inside. And if there was still any doubt in your mind before you passed under the arch that this wasn’t about big name galleries, artists and collectors, then the line of chauffeur driven cars waiting to your lift will confirm things.

It’s hardly cheap to enter either, at twenty quid a pop, and twenty-five on the weekend. And once you get inside, well, it’s like entering the equivalent of a giant hypermarket, except, instead of the foods and wines of the delicatessen; we are offered the delicacy of art. But it won’t be to every ones taste. There are a 150 galleries represented here from all over the world, from Tokyo, Berlin, Prague and even Rio.
And how do you even digest that much art? I decided to do lane-by-lane and go from there.

David Shrigley seemed to have put his towel down in the same space as the previous year, near the entrance. But then getting deeper and deeper into the sea of naïve brush marks, the continual use of the word ‘fuck’, the mop sculptures that kept springing up, the art started to lap at my admittedly, weak, powers of recollection, eroding my memory.

I must have been bombarded by thousands of items of art, but can recall few. I even found myself going round again, having forgotten the images, my brain just refusing to take any more in.

But some did stand out. Gursky’s ‘James Bond island’, had the power to stop you dead in you tracks and to gratefully take you out of the madding crowds of Frieze. His high POV of ‘The Kuwait Stock Exchange’ made me think how, from above, the hordes wandering between the thin wooden divides could only look like a mass lab rat art experiment.

And if you can find it, it’s well worth seeing Grayson Perry’s Walthamstow Tapestry – a vast needlework project full of brand names, women giving birth, through the seven ages of man, through childhood, adulthood, and eventually to death.

And some is memorable for entirely the wrong reasons. Reading a cartoon strip of Tin Tin as a colonial overlord bumming the black natives of a jungle, well you’d have to take that down if your Nan came to stay, that’s for sure.

In a previous year Jake and Dinos were knocking out ten-minute portraits. I asked Jake, though it could have been Dinos, how much to get one done? “I wouldn’t bother mate, it’s just for rich wankers” he said. But the ‘rich wankers’ were queuing up to pay their four grand to have their faces turned into grotesques. It kind of summed it up for me.

Going to Frieze is like supporting a football club, you feel you have to go along and see them. But it’s not always a pleasurable experience.

Not entirely recommended. Till 18 October, Regent’s Park