Matthew Slotover had just left Oxford with a psychology degree and no career plan when he started visiting the warehouse shows that Damien Hirst and his generation were staging across London in 1989. He had never studied art. He was so bad at it in school they wouldn't let him take the O-Level. But the work he was seeing felt like a breath of fresh air after academia, and when he picked up the existing art magazines to learn more, he found them unreadable — the writing impenetrable, the design poor, the coverage disconnected from the art that actually excited him. In June 1991, with artist Tom Gidley as co-editor, he launched frieze. Amanda Sharp joined the following month. The pilot issue featured the first-ever magazine interview with Damien Hirst, with a detail of a Hirst butterfly painting on the cover.
The timing was pure coincidence and pure luck: frieze arrived at the exact moment the Young British Artists were remaking the London art scene, and the magazine became their chronicle. Over the following decade, it grew into one of the world's most influential contemporary art publications — published eight times a year, read in over sixty countries, and home to the kind of critical writing that could make or break a career. Essays, profiles, interviews, and reviews by leading writers, artists, and curators established frieze as the benchmark for insightful art criticism.
Then Sharp and Slotover did something that transformed not just their publication but the entire art world: in 2003 they launched the Frieze Art Fair in Regent's Park. The fair became one of the most important commercial events in contemporary art, spawning editions in New York, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Abu Dhabi. In 2021, they opened No.9 Cork Street, a permanent gallery space in Mayfair. What began as a magazine by two people who thought existing art writing was garbage had become a global media and events empire — both Sharp and Slotover received OBEs for services to the visual arts in 2012. The magazine, now part of Endeavor, continues to set the standard for art criticism and commentary, a publication that has shaped how the world sees contemporary art for more than three decades.
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