Help! I Hate... The Guestlist

Every week, The Art Journal’s resident art world Agony Aunt Charlotte Jansen answers your questions about access, gatekeeping and sticky social problems.

Have a burning question for her? Get in touch anonymously here.

Frieze London is here, and my ambition this year is to somehow find myself at the right parties. How do you actually get on the guestlist for the best Frieze events?

Is there a secret etiquette I’m missing? Do I need to know a curator, own a gallery, or have an unexplained connection to a billionaire? I’m happy to network, charm, name-drop responsibly, and even pretend…

In the past, I have spent Frieze Week with the indignity of refreshing Instagram Stories and discovering I was standing three metres away from the party of the year. How does one become the sort of person who gets invited?

Frieze London is peak FOMO season – even the most VIP of VIPs occasionally get a whiff of not being on the right guestlists for the right parties. I’ve witnessed some near-acrobatic feats to break into parties. I was once part of a group in Venice who paid an extortionate fee (or at least, someone’s very kind partner paid it) to cross from one side of the canal to the other, in order to get in the back door of an especially exclusive party, only to be greeted by yet another supercilious person with a clipboard who promptly threw us out through the front door.

Some of us infiltrated the crowd – and to be honest, the wedding-party playlist and usual free Muscat bar weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Sometimes it’s more about the thrill of the chase.

This is to say that sometimes not being invited is actually more fun. The stricter the door policy, the less fun the party usually is. The RSVP policy for the British Pavilion party in Venice, for example, is notoriously convoluted, and the door policy so absurd that this year no one even bothered trying. What was left was an embarrassingly small group of people to wind and grind to Sisqó’s Thong Song – even Lubaina Himid herself made a hasty exit.

I’ve noticed that art parties lately are increasingly dry despite the free booze, with terrible DJs and zero atmosphere. Nothing wild happens. No one is shagging in the toilets, no one is dancing, and everyone leaves by 11pm. What I’m trying to say is, before you ask how to get on the list, maybe consider whether these parties are even worth going to anyway?

Nonetheless, you’re not alone in your Frieze season panic. The good news is that there is a secret to it – the bad news is that you don’t seem to be friends with any billionaires.

The first rule of Frieze guestlist etiquette is that there isn’t one guestlist. There are dozens, possibly hundreds – galleries, brands, museums, foundations, collectors, publications, artists, hotels and all those mysterious people who are ‘friends of’. The point is, you need to know whose list you want to be on.

If you’re really determined, despite my attempts to put you off, then the trick is not to chase the list, but to become adjacent to several of them. Start early (though you’re possibly already too late for that). ‘Can you get me in?’ is not an elegant opening gambit on the Tuesday of Frieze Week.

Introduce yourself to people without immediately asking what they can do for you. Go to the public talks, previews, breakfasts, panel discussions and smaller gallery events around the fair. These are where people actually meet. You may not emerge from a panel on the future of institutional collecting with an invitation to what’s being touted as the ‘party of the year’, but you might meet someone who works for the gallery hosting it. That is how these things tend to happen: sideways, organically and with considerably less name-dropping than you imagine.

Also, Instagram is not a guestlist strategy. It is where you discover, approximately twelve hours too late, that everyone you know was drinking martinis somewhere in Fitzrovia while you were watching Succession in your room.

Which brings us to networking. Please, for the love of contemporary art, don’t network like you’re trying to close a deal. Frieze is one of those rare environments where curiosity is considerably more attractive than ambition. Ask people what they’re looking at. Tell someone you liked an artist’s work. Make an observation that isn’t a disguised request. Be interested before being interesting.

If you do get invited somewhere, behave as though you have been invited somewhere before. This sounds obvious, but it is an artform. Arrive at a reasonable time. Don’t immediately ask who else is coming. Don’t photograph the door. Don’t post the location while you’re still inside. Don’t spend twenty minutes explaining how impossible it was to get on the list.

And, crucially, don’t treat the invitation as a transferable asset. Guestlists are social ecosystems, not airline miles.

There is also something to be said for having a reason to be there. You don’t need to be a collector with a warehouse full of Richard Prince works, but perhaps you’re interested in photography, emerging artists, design, performance or a particular gallery. Having a genuine point of connection makes you much more memorable than simply being ‘someone who loves art and parties’. Because, again, truly – the best parties aren’t artworld parties anymore.

As for the billionaire connection: entirely optional. Useful, presumably, but optional. The same goes for owning a gallery. Knowing a curator helps, but knowing the gallery assistant who knows where everyone is going after dinner may prove surprisingly valuable – and more fun.

Finally, accept that you will miss things. This is essential Frieze survival advice, and it is also life advice. There will always be another dinner you weren’t invited to, another warehouse you didn’t know existed and another photograph of someone you vaguely know standing beneath an enormous floral arrangement.

Resist the urge to measure your week by the events you couldn’t get into. And when someone says, ‘We’re going somewhere afterwards – come with us,’ just say yes.