“Drama Queens,” at the Old Vic: from left, Lesley Manville, Joseph Fiennes, Kevin Spacey, Alex Jennings and Jeremy Irons.

It’s something of a London tradition: the scrum of events, exhibitions and gallery shows timed to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park. That is true this year as well, and luckily many of the outlying shows last long after the fair is over.

The overall effect is of contrasts. If the 2008 Frieze, which ran for five days, ending on Sunday, offered a glimpse of a plush, moneyed-to-the-gills art world that may soon be history, the outlying shows in many cases seem more reality-based. By turns apocalyptic, brooding or sardonic, some of them make palpable the challenges and anxieties of contemporary life. Others introduce a deeper kind of art-about-art that feels relevant to the moment and can show artists alluding to older art in fresh and revealing ways. And there is Charles Saatchi’s new gallery, which reflects his latest area of collecting: contemporary art from China.

For apocalyptic, nothing beats this year’s Unilever Commission, which the Tate Modern has unveiled as usual in its vast Turbine Hall. The work, “TH. 2058,” is a capacious installation piece by the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. An effective pastiche of largely received ideas and familiar strategies, especially appropriation, it exemplifies the accessible (even obvious) Conceptual installation art that museums so often favor these days. By turns didactic, theatrical and hokey, the piece takes us 50 years into the future, to a time of ceaseless rain when the Turbine Hall (the “TH.” of the title) has become a public shelter.

The sound of rain pervades the space, which is filled with about 200 bare metal bunk beds painted blue or yellow. It might resemble the set of an environmental-disaster movie, except for the assortment of books, film and art available for perusal. In the brochure Ms. Gonzalez-Foerster alliteratively describes the situation as “a culture of quotation in a context of catastrophe.”

You can lounge around on the bottom bunks and page through the books, which range from science fiction classics like “War of the Worlds” and “Fahrenheit 451” to chilling assessments of contemporary life like Mike Davis’s “Dead Cities.” Things look even more hopeless in “The Last Film,” which is projected on a looming screen. It alternates snippets from films by avant-garde artists like Michael Snow, Robert Smithson and Chris Marker with others from more mainstream end-of-the-world movies, including “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Last Wave.” Most are scary or wet, or both.

This land-locked Ark also accommodates some slightly freakish works of outdoor sculpture. Towering above the bunks are enlarged versions of well-known pieces — some familiar from past Unilever commissions — that create a daisy chain of mutating ideas, bodies and species.

Some are monstrous, like a giant Louise Bourgeois spider and “Flamingo,” a red stabile by Alexander Calder. Others are truncated, like Bruce Nauman’s merry-go-round of trussed animals and the more benign shapes of Henry Moore’s “Sheep Piece.” By contrast, Maurizio Cattelan’s “Felix,” a giant skeleton of a cat, is all there, in detail. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s “Apple Core” is another skeleton — the one created when Eve took her famous bite.

In another instance of sculptural remakes, there was a one-time performance of “Drama Queens,” a droll play full of art world in-jokes by the Berlin-based art team Elmgreen & Dragset, with text by Tim Etchells. Staged as a benefit for the Old Vic Theater, it brought together robotized versions of modernist sculpture, including Giacometti’s “Walking Man,” a Sol LeWitt grid, Jeff Koons’s silver “Rabbit,” Barbara Hepworth’s biomorphic “Elegy III” and a granite stele by Ulrich Rückriem. All scooted around the stage arguing, commiserating and lamenting, as their lines were spoken by a starry cast seated at microphones in a box above the stage.

The actors included Joseph Fiennes, Jeremy Irons (as the Giacometti’s dreamy, French-accented bass voice) and Kevin Spacey, who made the Koons sound a bit too much like Bugs. Their talk traced a progression of aesthetic viewpoints, from postwar existentialism to post-Pop disco decadence and turned art-about-art into a highly entertaining form of art education.

Old-time existentialism — the philosophical crisis of an earlier era — prevails in two prominent exhibitions devoted to modern masters of pictorial angst, overt and covert. Overt angst suffuses the Tate Britain’s large retrospective of Francis Bacon’s paintings, making an exceptional case for the artist’s vision of psychic suffering, gorgeous color and bravura brushwork. A gallery devoted to Bacon’s notes, drawings, magazine images and staged photographs reveals the deliberation behind his art.

Across the Thames, the Tate Modern is showing a selection of paintings by Mark Rothko, all from the dozen years before he killed himself, in 1970. In the show’s enormous third gallery, 14 works from Rothko’s famous Four Seasons commission hang in hushed, slightly dim splendor (much too high on the wall if you ask me, but in keeping with Rothko’s instructions, it turns out). Executed in deep reds and blacks with occasional jolts of orange, these works show Rothko forsaking his stacked volumes of color for a more flexible, suggestive vocabulary of verticals, open squares and double rectangles.

Their archaic resonances evoke symbols, masks, calligraphy and post-and-lintel architecture. Yet nearly all the works in the show made after the murals are by turns darker, more hard-edged or deracinated. They suggest Rothko’s inability to sustain his new-found freedom. Bacon is known to have dismissed Rothko’s work as decorative; it is possible to imagine that Rothko saw Bacon’s writhing figures as hyperventilating excess. Still, in the end, Rothko’s interior life, culminating in suicide, seems somewhat closer to the one Bacon tried to paint.

The accessible art-about-art witnessed in the Gonzalez-Foerster piece at Tate Modern and the Elmgreen & Dragset sculpture drama re-emerges in the Tate Britain’s show of this year’s finalists for the Turner Prize, awarded annually to an artist under 50. The 2008 finalists — Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes — are making new inroads into the tired strategy of appropriation, giving it a new delicacy that includes the temporary matings of images and objects. Together, their works in video, sculpture and photography make the most cohesive Turner finalists show of recent memory.

As for galleries, the new ones scattered about Mayfair and adjacent neighborhoods give London something it has not had in years: a walkable gallery scene. At one, I was handed a cheaply printed map and told, off the record, that it excluded the so-called detritus — I paraphrase here — of galleries deemed less interesting. Noticeably absent were the Gagosian Gallery and Haunch of Venison, as well as Gimpel Fils, where Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, a Thai video artist, made a strong impression. Her videotapes of Thai farmers discussing lifesize replicas of masterpieces by Manet, Millet and van Gogh offered, almost inadvertently, insights and bits of humor regarding art that echoed the Elmgreen & Dragset play.

On the King’s Road in Chelsea it was possible to enter yet another art dimension, this one created by the collector Mr. Saatchi, the longtime patron of the young British art scene that emerged in the early 1990s (he paid for the fabrication of Damien Hirst’s first shark) and, given the amount of art he has sold, a dealer in his own right.

Mr. Saatchi’s new passion is contemporary Chinese art, which, as usual, he has acquired in bulk and will probably try to sell off in the not-too-distant future. It is now on display in his latest architectural setting, the former Duke of York’s Headquarters, which Mr. Saatchi has elegantly refurbished in partnership with Phillips de Pury & Company. The space is amazing: filled with light and air, and a vast improvement over his previous digs in County Hall, on the Thames.

Most of the art, however, is not ready for prime time. Like much derivative Western art of recent years, it is preoccupied with skill, narrative and some form of realism. In painting, that largely means a form of Photo Realism that is sometimes agitated with heavy brushwork and reminiscent of Malcolm Morley or Chuck Close. In sculpture it means either Surrealist or lifelike verisimilitude: Ron Mueck versus Duane Hanson, who was one of the first artists Mr. Saatchi collected.

Only occasionally is there an artwork that does not bring a raft of precedents to mind. One is Fang Lijun’s enormous woodblock, an oceanic field of waves or hills; the other is Zeng Fanzhi’s rawly Expressionist depiction of a crowded hospital waiting room. Tellingly, these works date from the mid-1990s, before the Chinese art boom began heating up, while the others date from the last few years. They very much look as if they were made to meet a demand that may soon not exist.