LONDON — The world of contemporary art comes to a noisy, Champagne-fueled head in London this week, as the Frieze and Pulse art fairs, as well as their satellites, Bridge and Zoo, hit the town.

Frieze will draw to London the world’s most serious contemporary art buyers, as well as anyone with an interest (vested or not) in the market. But alongside the best and brightest from the world’s top galleries, visitors can expect a surge of new blood from less established ventures. “This is the first time one feels the really big names — the Hirsts, Kiefers, and Koons — are not being given big precedence,” the art adviser for Frieze’s main sponsor, Deutsche Bank, Alistair Hicks, said. “Rather, galleries are pushing artists they envisage will be those kind of names five years down the line. Dealers are using Frieze as a promotional push, rather than as a showcase of supernames.”

This year, there are 14 new additions to the Frieze lineup, including four from New York. Notable first-timers from Chelsea include Taxter & Spengemann and Guild & Greyshkul. The two galleries are sharing a stand and collaborating on the idea of mirror images. One of the works is a double video projection, beaming reflected footage back and forth. Guild & Greyshkul will show a painting of the Birth of Venus by Matt Johnson opposite a Saint Theresa by Taxter’s Ryan Johnson.

“Life During Wartime” by relative newbie Wayne Atkins (Taxter & Spengemann) is a standout. The painting (worth around $15,000) explores the notion of the all-powerful artist who can manipulate space like no other. Gravity and other laws of nature are nothing to the artist: objects sit in seemingly impossible relation to one another; a hula hoop is slouched against a wall and a Josef Albers-inspired square appears to its left, from which a pair of earphones dangles. Opposite is Gareth Wiser’s “Husk” (Guild & Greyshkul), an inscrutable work of abstract geometry.

Chelsea’s veteran Gladstone Gallery will be in situ with work from Carroll Dunham, the creator of violent, vivid single cell images, and the celebrated mixologist of performance art, cinema, and exhibition (best known for his epic “Cremaster Cycle” films), Matthew Barney.

Homegrown galleries will delight and surprise too — among them the established giants White Cube, Sadie Coles, and Lisson Gallery. White Cube brings a new project from Jake and Dinos Chapman, who last year drew visitors’ portraits for 4,000 pounds a pop. This time the pair will adopt a more generous angle by drawing on people’s pound notes — whatever their size — and returning them, newly loaded with value.

The young Store Gallery is the new local favorite, exhibiting photos by the imaginative postmodern storyteller Ryan Gander and the video artist, who takes Palestine, America, and Scotland as her subjects, Rosalind Nashashibi.

Galleries from further afield will also impress. The director of Frieze, Amanda Sharp, said she is particularly happy to have Khoj, a nonprofit workshop from Delhi presenting multimedia art all about the city, alongside work from Morocco’s L’apartement Vingt-Deux, Frieze’s first representation from Africa.

But Ms. Sharp said she is most piqued about the specially commissioned Frieze Projects — art for art’s sake that “gives artists the reign of the fair.” One notable contribution is the first major installation in Britain by Richard Prince, who will here be showing a specially-made 1970 Dodge Challenger car. Is this art? Is it for sale? Nobody knows. Also playing with the idea of art and commerce will be Rob Pruitt, who is holding a flea market in the heart of the art market, inviting friends and family to set up shop. And Chris Martin will attempt to bring the fair to one minute of silence and with it, bring commerce to a halt. Ms. Sharp likes the “determined failure” of this project.

In its four years of life, Frieze has become a London institution. In contrast, this is Pulse’s first stop-off in Britain. The fair’s founder and director, Helen Allan, said she is wary of growing the brand too fast after phenomenal success in New York and Miami. Pulse has no London galleries on its books this year (Ms. Allan’s top choices are with Zoo), but she said London is absolutely the place to be. “Everyone is going to be here this week,” she said. Ms. Allan says that galleries are now making between 50 and 60 % of their revenue from art fairs, a notable increase on previous years. “London galleries are doing really interesting things, really pushing the bar and taking risks. A lot of international collectors are having to really look at London.”

Pulse will be particularly strong on video art, a form Ms. Allan said is beginning to be embraced by a wider audience. New York’s DNA Gallery will present the work of Tatsumi Orimoto, who once worked as the assistant to the world’s first serious video artist, Nam June Paik. Mr. Orimito’s subject is mental and physical decline, particularly that of his mother. Noga from Tel Aviv is another top gallery showing the work of the increasingly acclaimed video diarist Keren Cytter. Another standout is Chelsea’s DCKT Gallery, which is bringing the photo-based work of Lia Halloran, a Yale MFA graduate intent on capturing the skateboarding subculture.

Other top stands at Pulse include Italian sculpture gallery Perugi Artecontemporanea, which comes with an impressive cardboard installation from Chris Gilmore. And Germany’s Volker Diehl will present work by the New York installation artist Rina Banerjee. Top-end, veteran Viennese gallery Ernst Hilger will be showing paintings in the highest price range of the fair — work by Allen Jones will be on sale for around $40,000.

The activity at London this week will undoubtedly fan the flames of an already white-hot market.