Andreas Gursky

I met the Tate’s outgoing director Maria Balshaw only once, back when she was in Manchester running both the Whitworth gallery and the city’s municipal art museum. She was given to management-speak and annoying soundbites – she more than once described herself as ‘feisty ’ – but she’d done a superlative job. She was charismatic and supremely competent – in theory, the perfect candidate for the soon-to-be-vacant Tate leadership. She got the job two years later, but the confrontational demeanour that had worked so well up north didn’t wash in London, where the phrase ‘can do’ routinely elicits the same retort: no, you can’t. Meanwhile, a series of PR cock-ups

Taking place every October in Regent’s Park, the Frieze fair is probably the biggest event in London’s art calendar. It is also, as a spectacle, by far the least enjoyable. With works crammed into cubicle-sized booths, and punters battling a crossfire of air kisses and the palpable stress ricocheting around the flimsy partitions, I struggle to think of a worse context in which to look at art of any stripe. Still, it always used to be an occasion to take the pulse of the contemporary art world, to pick out the visual signatures of the reigning avant-garde tendency and clock what Jeremy Deller was doing with his facial hair at