The jet set have landed

As it celebrates its third year, the weekend extravaganza that is London's Frieze Art Fair is leaving conventional museum shows in the shade

Frieze Art Fair

Regent's Park, London NW1

As the glow of Regent's Park's translucent tent city, temporary home of what for this weekend is the epicentre of the known art world, comes into view under the dark London sky like some vast James Turrell installation, I can't get the idea of an airport out of my head. It's not just the clatter of helicopters overhead, or the neon landing lights in Frieze's outdoor sculpture garden. Nor is it the security teams on the door, briskly efficient types who would do Heathrow proud, processing the queues far more smoothly than the Monday morning short-haul rush at Terminal One, that make me feel I am lost in transit.

The Frieze Art Fair feels as if the flying circus of dealers from Basel, curators from Barcelona, museum owners from Istanbul, collectors from Los Angeles, and even the occasional artist from Hoxton or Berlin who constitute the perpetual shifting landscape of art, have given up perpetually circumnavigating the globe, and decided to turn themselves collectively into an airport. There are check-in counters to collect your boarding pass and executive club lounges reflecting the delicious social nuances in hierarchy of the world of collecting. There is the subtle, just-not-quite-invisible Deutsche Bank suite, a world of gloss-black discretion, guarded by a large and notably humourless man, for first-class passengers.

Immediately next door is the not-quite-so-glossy Frieze VIP lounge, for the exclusive use of the run-of-the-mill club class: the international champagne-swilling, beer-from-the-bottle-drinking artocracy.

And, as you might expect in any self-respecting airport, there is even what appears to be a gang of asylum seekers, fresh off the flight from Dalian, waiting patiently for their chance to slip into the city beyond. Or, as the Wrong Gallery would have it, a performance work entitled 100 Chinese. It takes the form of a standard exhibitor's booth, glimpsed through a slot in a white wall, crammed with what are, confusingly, actually only 50 Chinese people, dressed in identical tracksuits, in neat, slightly cowed rows. They look like the scene in the recent film about a dystopian Los Angeles, Crash, when the doors of a truck swing open to reveal a squashed cargo of smuggled people staring back at the audience.

And as if to show how far Frieze magazine's founders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover have come since they decided to launch a world-class art event in London, when the opening night was overwhelmed by snaking queues of black-clad hordes strung right across the park, this year an air of calm efficiency prevails throughout the Frieze terminal. Open the door marked 'Organisers', and you find yourself in air traffic control, rank upon rank of computer screens, tended by very nice, very young and very competent art world administrators. This time around, nobody is going to be spilling beer or tapping fag ash over minor masterpieces.

Despite the miniature radio station in one corner, and the disco turntables in another, and the presence of transvestite potters, and Becks beer's art programme supremo Anthony Fawcett, the mood is of decorous, well mannered calm.

The most remarkable thing about Britain is just how quickly we can establish the kind of instant traditions that feel as if they have been around for ever. The 24-month-old Frieze Art Fair already feels like the Henley Regatta kitted out in Prada, or Trooping the Colour by Comme des Garçons. Or as Tim Marlow, exhibitions director for the White Cube Gallery, dodging the Art Deco microphones and British Rail logo that clutter Jay Jopling's space, puts it: 'It feels like the oldest art fair in the world.'

Certainly, there is a touch of world-weariness in the air. Britart godfather Michael Craig-Martin and eponymous gallery owner Tim Taylor swap tales of misspent youths, while Anish Kapoor makes a careful, bemused progress through the departure lounge, picking his way past the fashion maven Suzy Menkes and the fiery Spanish curator of the last Venice Biennale, Rosa Martinez.

Frieze may feel old, but it's not boring yet. How could it be, when hearing people talk money is always electrifying. As you pass the displays of resin replicas of human heads, of battered architectural models, of punk photographs, of people from Athens trying to offload a job lot of Gilbert and George, you hear the discrete and constant murmur of dollars and euros and pounds.

In the press corner, The Art Newspaper peddles its daily edition, containing a profile of the US Ambassador, Robert Tuttle, a man who made his money out of selling cars. 'We aren't really collectors,' confides his wife, Maria. 'We are just fortunate enough to have some things.' The art hacks gossip about the news that the relentless Canadian art groupie and social mountaineer Louise McBain has just signed up James Truman, formerly of Conde Nast, to launch a new monthly magazine which will pump more of fashion's glamour into its coverage of art. An even newer entrant in the arts publishing scene is Elena Foster, wife of the architect of the Gherkin. She has produced her first issue of her own magazine, but isn't planning a public launch for a month or two yet. It's all a lot of high-energy fun, but there is still a world beyond the airport. I meet Tate Modern curator Sheena Wagstaff in the baggage hall on the way out. She has a shiny new copy of the London A-to-Z under her arm, trailing Post-It notes from every second page. 'It's to find the parties outside,' she explains, with what looks like relief.

The parties are a closed circuit restricted to the art mafia, who glide off into the night in their Bentleys. But over the weekend, Frieze opens its doors to the masses. Some 42,000 people bought tickets last time around, happy just to read the labels and experience the heady rush of art-world glamour. Frieze produces a three-day firework display that no gallery or museum staging exhibitions that last for months can match.