‘Frieze is just like an extremely important week for the city.’ So drooled one socialite to Vanity Fair ahead of Frieze Los Angeles. Frieze, under CEO Fox, is adept at making an art fair feel like an event, and this year added to its US footprint not only by moving the West Coast edition to Santa Monica Airport but by hosting the recently acquired Expo Chicago and the Armory Show in New York. ‘The economics of art fairs are challenging,’ Fox told the same reporter in March. Referring to Emanuel’s Endeavor, Frieze’s parent company, he added, ‘We are taken very seriously by Ari and the team’. A month is a long time in business. A few weeks later plans were put in place to take Endeavor private in 2025 (after equity fund Silver Lake bought the $13b of stock it didn’t already own), and the group is now considering selling the art fair in a pessimistic market: just ‘moderate sales’ were reported at the third edition of Frieze Seoul, though the London original was deemed more successful, helped by the sale of a number of works to several UK institutional collections (aided by Endeavor-funded partnerships with the fair) including the Contemporary Art Society, Tate and the Arts Council.