Minor Attractions Turns a London Hotel Into a Fair for Emerging Art

Minor Attractions opened its fourth edition on Tuesday, with 38 galleries from 15 countries installed across 16 bedrooms at The Newman, a newly opened hotel in central London. The fair runs until Saturday, positioned in the margins of Frieze Week.

Co-founder Jacob Barnes framed the move as growth, not retreat. "We wanted to expand our footprint and grow. We needed a little bit of a refresh," he told ARTnews at the VIP preview. "London's the best city in the world and I believe that wholeheartedly because what's happening here is more exciting than anywhere else." Barnes said international and billionaire collectors are already walking through the door, and that his job is engaging collectors, advisers and curators with a younger audience while "not isolating an older, maybe more established audience."

What does the hotel format change for young exhibitors?

For many exhibitors, Minor Attractions is a first art fair. Kindred, a Farringdon record store and radio station running for six years, hosts DJ sets on Friday from DVD, Temz, Angelkin and Scar. The same room holds artworks by Felix Butterwick, Eva Delaney and Salvi De Sena, priced from £550 to £3,000.

"Galleries can sometimes feel cold and not super active in terms of what happens in that space. A lot of the artists we're showing are people we've met through the shop," said Kindred co-founder Scarlet Griffiths, who is also exhibiting her own photography. She describes her process: "I use photography as the starting point and a lot of it goes through repetitive hand processes such as scratching or stamping, I get into a very meditative state with it."

Goldsmiths MFA graduates Moses Tan and Philip Steele scattered luxury items across a bedroom, closet and bathroom. "I'm interested in queerness and monstrousness. I was thinking about how I'm from Singapore, where censorship is a thing and because of that, we are deemed as monstrous. So, why not put myself as a monster out there to invite people in?" Tan said. Steele placed Prada shoes and a white Prada bag, each fitted with a water fountain, as a statement on the life cycle of grief. Their works range from £800 to £3,000.

The duo Bora Akincitürk and Millie Rose Dobree asked whether wellness is the new luxury, building an installation from palo santo remnants, a lighter with a marijuana leaf decal, a discarded McDonald's drink, a used condom and tie-dye towels. One of the hotel's housekeepers trashed part of it — a testament to its authenticity. "Participating in a fair at a posh hotel gives us something to push against and a lot of the work I show and make is commenting on capitalism and consumerism with a mix of desires," Dobree said.

Can a small fair sell alongside Frieze?

Lauren Fulcher, director of Tache, a gallery opened in 2025, credits the fair with building her London sales. "It's really important to have this fair exist alongside Frieze as there's an emerging class of collectors who are international and British with purchasing power who are more interested in emerging artists," she said. Tache presented French artist Léa Porré, who works in wood and steel.

The fair also draws seasoned dealers. London-based Cedric Bardawil, participating since the fair's inception in 2023, called last year's edition — featuring Los Angeles artists Francesca Gabbiani and Eddie Ruscha — "a huge success." "It also worked really well commercially and it was a sellout," he said. This year he shows British artists Paul Housley, Anthony Banks and Hannah Tilson, starting at £3,000, with collector interest from buyers in their mid-to-late 20s and upwards.

Bardawil shared a room with Belgium's Tatjana Pieter, who has run her contemporary gallery since 2005. "It's really important that we really start to collaborate together instead of working against each other. The art world is a little bit under pressure and we need to start working together for the bigger goal," she said. Pieter exhibited Brian Harte and Anneke Eussen from £2,000, capping her presentation under £15,000 after collectors asked for "good paintings" in that range rather than impulse buys at £300,000 or more. "I'm often selling to young people between 20s to 40s," she said, targeting collectors from the US, Europe, Asia and now China — "this is why London is important, it has access to all these continents."