God, I feel old, traipsing around the ninth Frieze art fair. I feel like I have been here for almost a decade. It turns out I have. I have become a stranger to daylight. Someone said I looked like a B-boy in my patent hi-top trainers, but I had to ask a passing curator what a B-boy is. A very bad band was rapping about "Having sex with them" in LuckyPDF's spot, where the Peckham collective is making live recordings and daily TV broadcasts. Peckham is the new Shoreditch, I hear. Better get down there quick.
I didn't know who was supposed to be having sex with whom, and the band all looked so studiedly youthful that I left, in search of a makeover. You can get one at A Gentil Carioca's stand. The gallery is from Rio de Janeiro. Your chair awaits, along with the lights, mirrors, jars of unguents and a real makeup artist. The trouble is the makeover: the scheme, in this project by Laura Lama, is to make you look older. I told the makeup artist I'd already had the treatment and was really only 16, but I don't think she believed me. Some of the collectors wandering about look a million years old, but I don't think they've been slathered, in latex and instant-wrinkle cream either.
You age by the minute in here. One alarming sculpture, by Romanian-born Andra Ursuta, is a lifesize body cast, showing the artist as an iron-age mummy, preserved by being buried for millennia in a northern European peat bog. I notice her hi-tops are still intact. She is also covered in a copious quantity of fake, glistening semen. This is not the sort of thing one can easily overlook. Ursuta's abject sculpture is actually one of the better examples of a kind of figurative sculpture that is always with us: by turns jokey, laughable, stupid and extreme, in a frequently pointless and tiresome way.
A monstrous, trudging god (like the last man to finish a gruelling marathon) has a patch of stinging nettles growing out of his back. This is by Folkert de Jong, and it's called the New Deal. It looks like a very old deal to me.
Better is the billy-goat costume that artist Paweł Althamer has travelled the world wearing, following the journeys of a Polish children's-book character. The goat is now taking a breather, sitting in the pose of Rodin's The Thinker, but looking a bit stunned. Elsewhere, Darren Lago has morphed Rodin's 1891 Monument to Balzac with Mickey Mouse. Why, I ask, but can't really be bothered to find out. I don't care that much. The fair is too big, and there isn't time. What collectors do with this stuff is a better question: stick it in the corner of the living room, frighten the kiddies with it?
Some of this art is for the birds. A flock of funny little bronze birds by Ugo Rondinone peck at an achingly white floor. A stuffed goose by Javier Téllez regards a little Brancusi-like tower of enormous golden eggs (this must be a metaphor about the art world); while a live hermit crab has taken a bronze cast of Brancusi's 1910 Sleeping Muse as its new home in Pierre Huyghe's aquarium, one of the better of this year's commissioned Frieze projects. This is odd and extremely beautiful. The art-encumbered crab clambers over the rocks, oblivious that the hollowed-out head it is wearing is art. Or perhaps it knows perfectly well who Brancusi is.
It is certainly a great deal more lively and lovely than Christian Jankowski's motor yacht, which punters can buy either as an expensive pleasure boat – or, for a bit more dosh, as an artwork. I find this a witless and trivial Duchampian gag. "Oh no," I imagine the proud new owner saying, "this isn't my expensive new yacht, this is an artwork for which I paid over the odds just so I can tell you about it and show off my extreme sophistication, my sense of humour and my utter lack of taste".
Bananas are in this year. I counted two, but there could be more. A stuffed chimp, teetering on a pile of heavy-duty art books reaches for one, dangling from on high in a work by Elmgreen and Dragset, and the other is spotlit, suspended on fishing line, like an indoor new moon, in a work by Urs Fischer. Work is perhaps not the word. (Neither are as good as the cameo-role banana in Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, which Harold Pinter refused to act with or, rather, eat.)
