Good evening, and welcome back to Wall Power, coming to you from the National Theatre in London as the curtain rises on David Oyelowo in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus.

While I take a breather from a whirlwind couple of days to enjoy a tragedy about political populism, let me share my impressions of Frieze week in London. If art fairs had lineages, there would be two dominant families. The older, perhaps more refined, would be Art Basel, founded by Ernst Beyeler in Switzerland more than 50 years ago. The upstart challenger would be Frieze, the scrappy contemporary art fair that grew out of a London art magazine and the success of the YBA movement.

Each has expanded to other cities, and they are now facing each other this month across the English Channel, with Frieze London this week followed shortly thereafter by Art Basel Paris. It’s not clear who really wants this struggle for dominance. (A competition that’s been complicated by Brexit, the abolition of the old non-dom regime, fears that France could reinstate its wealth tax, etcetera.)

Here in London, a lot has been programmed around the Frieze fair, including scores of...

For this season’s cluster of shows in London, I timed my flight to arrive later in the day, in order to hit the ground running at the auction house viewings. Many galleries have shows opening...