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Aladdin’s cave of marvels: the Museum of Everything includes an example of Charles AA Dellschau’s mixed media folk art

Kinetic sculpture: Conrad Shawcross: Chord, Kingsway Tram Subway

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• An artist's guide to Frieze

I am allergic to anything that happens in marquees - weddings, chill-out zones and art fairs.

It only takes a few minutes inside the Frieze tent before I feel I can't breathe.

The long phalanxes of gallery booths and ultra-white strip lighting make me feel like I'm in an overcrowded Texan penitentiary for those convicted of art dealing.

But many of the best events happen outside the art fair in well-ventilated, underpopulated venues.

In fact, most galleries save up their most important shows of the year for this time, the museums open their blockbusters (Ed Ruscha at the Hayward, Pop Life and Baldessari at the Tate), and there is a raft of one-off shows, many of which pop up only this week. Take your pick.

Museum of Everything
Corner of Regent's Park Road and Sharples Hall Street, NW1 (www.museumofeverything.com). Until Sunday

No question, this is the do-not-miss event of Frieze week. James Brett, a maverick collector of naïve, folk and outsider art has converted a rambling old recording studio into a glittering Aladdin's cave of marvels.

The winding corridors and small rooms are perfectly suited for the display of charming and sometimes cra-a-a-azy art dating from the early 19th century.

There is a room of drawings by Henry Darger, full of innocent children gambolling in Edenic landscapes (don't worry, officer, there's no need to send the Child Protection Unit round). There are a handful of Ned Chand's figures made from discarded pottery fragments and beads (back in the Punjab, Chand has filled two square kilometres with these totems).

Yet the big names of outsider art are hung next to the most obscure discoveries. Look out for the chapel-like installation of the work of Sister Getrude Doyle and the intricate Indian Temple made from computer parts by A.C.M.

John Baldessari: Ear Sofa
Sprüth Magers, 7A Grafton Street, W1 (020 7408 1613, www.spruethmagers.com). Until 14 November

John Baldessari, the granddaddy of conceptual art, has a retrospective at the Tate but also this witty tableau vivant at his commercial gallery, viewed from outside like a shop window.

A model in a blonde wig strokes a poodle on an ear-shaped sofa. Around her feet lie chocolate boxes. Everything is in white. On the walls, the vases, which hold lilies (white, of course), are in the shape of upturned noses, a cute reference to a recurring motif in the artist's dryer work.

It all looks like a fashion photograph from 1930s Vogue. Just don't ask what it costs to hire a white poodle for six weeks.

Grayson Perry: The Walthamstow Tapestry
Victoria Miro Gallery, N1 (020 7336 8109, www.victoria-miro.com). Until 7 November

Grayson Perry's largest tapestry to date - all 15 metres of it - is hung in Victoria Miro's enviable, rarely opened upper-floor gallery. As usual, it's a witty panorama of modern mores, loosely organised as the Seven Ages of Man, which means the figures get older as you read it from left to right.

Punk girls with shopping trolleys, a guy in a wheelchair on a mobile phone, a portrait of the Queen and a junkie shooting up are interspersed with scores of random but apposite brand names (Pentium, Piaggio, Yamaha, Carlsberg and Ford in just one corner), empty packaging and the odd pheasant.

There is also a handful of new pots here that combine Perry's neat newspaper cutouts and fashion-y drawings of girls with parasols. Perry is a witty and surprising chronicler of our times, a cross between the American cartoonist Saul Steinberg and 16th-century Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The Embassy is dead, long live the Embassy
Sierra Leone Embassy, 33 Portland Place, W1 (www.20hoxtonsquare.com). Until Monday

The most dramatic special project of the week, this is a group show, mostly of promising emerging artists, staged in the former Sierra Leone embassy, loosely based on the theme of a corrupt dictatorship.

Wolfe Lenkiewicz contributes a handful of his modern-day spins on Baroque allegories; Alistair Mackie has made a model of the Capitol in Washington out of mud and New Yorker sleb-artist Terence Koh is in there with a decaying head. Pianist Rosey Chan has composed the national anthem.

The art is a little on the sensational side but you can't beat the location or the spectacle in this stunning, somewhat dilapidated Regency House.

Walid Raad: Scratching On Things I Could Disavow
Anthony Reynolds Gallery, W1 (020 7439 2201, www.anthonyreynolds.com). Until 31 October

Walid Raad, who investigates the culture and politics of the Middle East, creates fictional back-stories for his work. Downstairs, there is a flawless model of a retrospective exhibition in a Lebanese gallery (which we may assume never happened).

Here you can see miniature versions of Raad's elegaic series of photographs of bombed Lebanese apartment buildings. It's cute.

Upstairs Raad exhibits plain pieces of coloured paper, with small texts on them, apparently all that's left of the once-thriving Lebanese art world after a city-flattening war.

Raad echoes the miniaturised box-sets of "complete works" that Marcel Duchamp produced and the fictional museum created by the cult Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers.

You may not thank me for sending you to this exhibition but it's good for you.

BEST OF THE REST

Fallen Out of Space
Mol's Place, 23 Macklin St, WC2 (07826 378 297). Until 20 October.

Amazing private architect-designed home of collector Jan Mol, in the heart of Covent Garden, which is opened a only couple of times a year. The art on the walls comes from a variety of younger artists based in the UK.

Conrad Shawcross: Chord
Kingsway Tram Subway, W1 (www.measure.org.uk). Until 8 November.

Large-scale installation by London's ambitious and talented modern-day kinetic sculptor in an extraordinary underground location. Visit by appointment.

Is There Anybody There?
WW Gallery, 30 Queensdown Road, E5 (07531 342 128; www.wilsonwilliamsgallery.com). Until
5 November.

Charming, tiny, out-of-the-way, this exhibition is in a former East End crack house. Annabel Tilley's Murder Drawings, an array of little Biro sketches of killers, are impressive, as are the oils of Jarik Jongmann, a former studio assistant of Anselm Kiefer.

Otolith Group: A Long Time Between Suns Part 2
The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, NW8 (020 7724 4300; www.the showroom.org). Until 24 October.

The latest film from Otolith, a cult group of underground film-makers from Hackney. You will be drawn in by the dreamy sci-fi feel and seductively enigmatic voiceover.

The Age of the Marvellous
One Marylebone, NW1 (http://allvisualarts.org). Until 22 October.

The curators behind this group exhibition, All Visual Arts, know how to put on exciting shows in big locations: this one is in a former Holy Trinity Church designed by Sir John Soane.

Yinka Shonibare
Stephen Friedman, W1 (020 7494 1434, www.stephenfriedman.com). Until 20 November.

New work from the next incumbent of the Fourth Plinth. This is an exhibition of new photographs which mashes up Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman with Dante's Inferno.

 

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