Frieze masters review – treasures mixed with kitsch in art's big tent

Walking into this year's Frieze Masters, where art made before the 21st century is for sale, one of the first stands is done up as a sort of seaside garden. There's a pond, a

profusion of plants and pebbles, a decorative old watering can and a white beach hut. On the door hangs a sign, the words "gone fishing" chalked on a bit of slate. Dear God. The

whole thing is meant to evoke Barbara Hepworth's garden and studio in St Ives. Hepworth's sculptures stand around on plinths among the rocks, and amid clumps of coastal grasses and

a jungle of green foliage. It gets worse. The plants are artificial and there are stuffed seagulls on the roof of the hut and by the pond. The labels to the artworks are chalked on slate.

Who is the Dickinson gallery ("private advisors and fine art dealers", its website says) trying to kid? And why aren't the gallery staff wearing stripy T-shirts and

fisherman's cable-knit jumpers to complete the effect? A one-day combined ticket to Frieze London and Frieze Masters is priced at more than £60, and displays like this give the fair a

bad name. Maybe it is meant to be ironic, but I doubt it. Look, we know art fairs are contrived, with their little stage-set booths decorated as clean white galleries, or olde-worlde

antiquities and rare book emporia and hushed and carpeted Mayfair basements, but there are limits even to my credulity. Weaving up and down the aisles, with mad impetuous lunges into this

stand and that, things still do snag the eye, surprise and horrify in equal measure. Gagosian has a great display of Man Ray's sculpture, photographs and ephemera, much of which

I'd never seen before. Swinging by Brazilian Lygia Pape's jiggling black and white reliefs, shimmying past the stand stuffed with William Tillyer's paintings and trellises and

sheets of paint-mangled metal grilles, looking askance at a big renaissance portrait above which the words "Artemisia Gentileschi" are printed in big, bold lettering, I pause and

draw a breath. I've got my eye in and I'm full tilt and hungry for quality. Got my connoisseurship hat on, me. The Gentileschi looks fresh, too fresh, the surface evened out by

restoration and varnish and the picture-liner's skills. Woah. Dig deep and you'll come across Delacroix drawings and a terrific Lucas Cranach the Elder Mocking of Christ, and

Pierre Molinier having it away with himself in cross-dressed photographic collages. Derek Jarman's angry Aids paintings roar from the wall at the Amanda Wilkinson gallery. Thomas

Ruff's 1981 photographs of bleak corners of German domestic interiors, alongside Berndt and Hilla Becher's records of framework houses at Sprüth Magers, make a terrific display. In

the Spotlight section, Richard Saltoun shows Annegret Soltau, whose photographic self portraits – collaged into, sutured and sewn and drawn over – stopped me in my tracks. Looking back down

one of the aisles, I recall that the metres and metres and metres of yellow, crossing an otherwise empty Olivier Mosset painting in a big horizontal stripe, was meant to be viewed on the

run. Overly energised, I nearly careened into a stand lain out with hyper-valuable Japanese pots, and had to slow myself down by grabbing a sculpture by Franz West, a great sickly pink lumpy

thing on a stalk, with a hole in it at crotch height. The title, Urinello, infers that it could also be used as a pissoir. Now wash your hands. Thomas Dane Gallery has a selection of 1960s

sculptures that vaguely recreates the Whitechapel art gallery's 1965 New Generation show, which featured nine men who did things with steel, painted in nasty bright industrial colours.

I'm sure it was all very "with it" at the time but much of it looks a bit silly and strained now. A photo from Tatler shows these serious-looking white dudes in their man-drag

of plaster-spattered denim, tweed and beards. Most of them went on to teach sculpture at St Martin's School of Art. They had a lot to answer for. They probably drove Gilbert into the

arms of George and set Richard Long off on his lonely walks so he could escape their tutorials. Masters, indeed. * Frieze Masters is in Regent's Park, London, 5-7 October.