Why Contemporary Art worships Ugliness

It may be art, but it's also ugly – an offering from the Gagosian Gallery (Author's photo)

A Martian landing in Regent's Park this weekend would be jolly confused. There are two Frieze art shows on. One – Frieze Masters – has works of great beauty by Cranach, Brueghel, Zurbaran and Degas. The other – the contemporary Frieze show – has various bits of distended metal, mutilated pornography and a few messages scribbled in children's handwriting. Guess which one is packed.

I suppose it's rather heartening that London is collaring some of the huge amounts of cash that are swilling round the contemporary art world. You can forget the recession here – there are million pound plus price tags on these works, being sold by Germans, Americans, South Americans and British. And the Chinese, too – I don't think Chairman Mao would have been a fan of the Long March Space gallery from Beijing.

But why does it all have to be so extremely ugly? It all comes out of a desire to be avant-garde and, by extension, contrary; and what could be more contrary to the beauty of the pictures at Frieze Masters than the ugliness of those at Frieze? The same goes for the people buying it. Well, for their ugly clothes anyway; at both shows, the people themselves are astonishingly good-looking. I saw one fat person in several hours – a young British girl, of course, but, still, at least she had a little animation to her features.

The clothes of the contemporary art buyer are also consciously contrary; anything to be original rather than beautiful. One Japanese man was dressed in a white space suit with an outsized pixie hat on his head. Even the young men in expensive suits ensured their trouser legs were consciously too short – to show that some supposedly artistic attention had been paid to something as dully conventional as a suit. The pencil-thin grandes – and vieilles – dames of the art world wore oversized Jackie O dark specs on this overcast afternoon, like superannuated Josephine 90s. Several of the men sported novelty sideburns straight out of Thomas Hardy's Dorset, c. 1874.

For all their supposed alternative dress, they were of course all from the international white elite – the only black men I saw were emptying bin bags in the gallery restaurant and checking bags on the way in.

The art on show was the normal stuff that tries to shock but ends up just boring: 1970s Emmanuelle film posters, customised with nonsensical black blots of black paint; some mammoth candles off a birthday cake; a selection of empty plastic bottles of Diet Coke; a murder mystery film being filmed live that you knew wouldn't be as good as an episode of Prime Suspect; a few timbers nailed together that don't look a hundredth as beautiful as a half-timbered cottage in East Anglia.

The most beautiful thing in the contemporary show was a Regent's Park tree, with its changing autumn leaves. It had been covered by the temporary structure of the gallery and so was accidentally included in the show along with all the tat. No one was looking at it.