In his 2023 New Yorker profile of the legendarily ruthless art dealer and preening silverback Larry Gagosian, Patrick Radden Keefe quotes a high-end international collector. The art-collecting world, the source admits, can be depressing. “[They] don’t really say, ‘Oh, this is an incredible painting and the colours are fabulous and it was influenced by Renoir.’ It’s more, ‘Well, this is seven million dollars, but Steve Cohen has bought one that sold for seven and a half, and there’s one that’s coming to auction that could reach nine.’ Sometimes they forget that it’s art.”
On first approach, I thought All That Glitters, a memoir by self-described “recovering” art dealer Orlando Whitfield, would contain predictable pleasures. An insider’s gossipy exposé of a noxiously secretive, absurdly self-regarding world, populated with a revolving cast of international grotesques – the grasping artists, cynical gallerists and feckless, chronically insecure private collectors that keep the whole circus afloat. A slice of jolly eat-the-rich satire, scything through, as Whitefield puts it, “the gooey layers of absurdity and frivolous late capitalism that the international art scene now embodies”.
But Whitfield’s book is not just Sidebar of Shame-meets-Frieze Miami – it reaches greater emotional depths. In 2006, Whitfield began an art history degree at Goldsmiths College, hoping that south-east London would promise more excitement than his solidly middle-class English upbringing (his father had been the managing director of London auction house Christie’s) had allowed. It was there that he met Inigo Philbrick, a handsome, erudite and well-connected young American, with a penchant for long lecture-hall disquisitions on the writings of Arthur Danto and the gender politics of Lee Lozano. “Things no one else in the class had ever heard of, let alone had defensible opinions on.” Though it took some time, the two ambitious young men became almost inseparable. Their long years of friendship passed through many phases – from joy to pained exasperation – on the way to its eventual collapse.
If Whitfield was fated to remain a “bottom-of-the-rung” art dealer, it seemed that Inigo Philbrick was destined for stardom. Still in his early twenties, he became a protégé of Jay Jopling, the London fixer extraordinaire and founder of the White Cube gallery. By his thirties, Philbrick was a sensation, routinely closing multimillion-dollar deals involving some of the most famous artists and wealthiest, most secretive collectors on the planet. At 34, he was sentenced to seven years in an American prison for masterminding an extraordinarily complex fraud worth tens of millions of dollars. In 2022, the Guardian reported on his $86m schemes, including “selling more than 100 per cent of an artwork to multiple investors without their knowledge, using works as collateral on loans without informing their co-owners, and falsifying documents to inflate artwork values”. Why had such a promising young man thrown his future away, wondered the judge at the subsequent trial? “For the money, your honour,” Philbrick had replied.
Orlando Whitfield is well placed to provide a more searching answer. The story begins in their student days, after a shared summer trip to a New York gallery. Wasn’t the commercial gallery world where the action really was? Perhaps they could work together on sorting out a couple of deals. Their first success involved a Paula Rego watercolour belonging to a squiffy London art-world stalwart. After tapping up a well-connected Iberian course-mate, a Portuguese buyer was duly sourced. Weeks later, Whitfield and Philbrick were on a 6am budget flight to Lisbon. At the liminal corporate hotel, Whitfield drowned his nerves with a double whiskey, while Philbrick remained a picture of calm. The deal, involving a florid, chain-smoking middle-aged gallerist, netted the two undergraduate wannabes a £3k commission. “Was this really work?” Whitfield remembers marvelling. “Is this what art dealers do?” Boarding the return flight, his excitement was unrestrained. “I think we both imagined it would be like this for the rest of our lives.”
Innocence, however relative, is soon eviscerated by experience, told through a few winning set pieces, including a farcical attempt to prize a Banksy mural from a wall in London. As Philbrick’s star ascends to a rarefied altitude, the two go their professional separate ways, one senses, to Whitfield’s subconscious relief. The next few years see Whitfield flit between publishing and his own, comparatively modest, art-dealing exploits, as well as a stint working at one of Philbrick’s seemingly endless ventures. The two remained close friends. Whitfield could see the noose gradually tightening around his friend’s neck long before the final catastrophe, even if he was powerless to stop it. When Philbrick flees police, it’s Whitfield he confides in over email. Even this gesture is not straightforward. “I believe he wanted something in return: he wanted me to tell not just his side of the story, but his version of the truth.”
It’s true, as Whitfield muses in the book’s introduction, that we are living through a golden age of scammer literature. Our collective, apparently insatiable, thirst for tales of grifters and con artists has taken us to some strange places in the past decade, from the epic grimness of the Fyre Festival portaloos to the boardrooms of corporate America. Any such story’s success partially depends on the characters at its heart. And Philbrick is a compelling foil, a hyper-modern cautionary tale of the declension of talent and charm into moral corruption. Whitfield makes for a sympathetic Virgil in our descent into the ceaseless, pointless decadence of the contemporary art world: a world in which Philbrick is by no means a rogue outlier.
It’s a world that trades on illusion as much as hard cash. What Philbrick or any aspiring hotshot worth their Connaught hotel bar tab must quickly understand is the central importance of the dream. Access, Whitfield explains – to the most exclusive cultural gatekeepers, the hottest young artists and, most importantly, the wealthiest collectors – is everything: “The intoxicating, intangible and priceless X factor… that has kept the market as buoyant as an oligarch’s yacht.” Philbrick knew this from the beginning. “Soon I’d be used to Inigo,” Whitfield writes, “who seemed to already know everyone worth knowing in this new world of beauty and money, pulling me away from people he wanted to avoid.”
The more I read, the more I was reminded of the famous Dennis Potter interview given to Melvyn Bragg weeks before the screenwriter’s death from cancer in June 1994. “We should always look back on our own past with a sort of tender contempt. As long as the tenderness is there, but please [also] let some of the contempt be there.” Just look, he sighed, at how thoughtlessly we move through the world, “how we hustle and bustle and shove and push and sometimes use grand words to cloak it”. How easy and natural it is to consider greed or pride as sins for other people, never ourselves.
I’d been intrigued to see how Whitfield would navigate this tonal minefield: it would be easy to overdo the contempt. Certainly, there’s a breezy grotesqueness to the endless carousel of £2k Mayfair lunches and transatlantic flights he depicts, “the hamster wheel of dinners and parties and studio visits and fairs and auctions”. But this glamour is also undeniably seductive. And there are moments of fleeting transcendence, too. The book’s moral counterweight arrives through its supporting cast, including Piers Townshend, a wonderfully avuncular painting conservationist who took Whitfield under his temporary tutelage following a mental health crisis in 2017.
Reviewers will no doubt group Inigo Philbrick as another contemporary Ripley, plucked to sit alongside Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried and Anna Delvey on the Mount Rushmore of modern con artists. While there is something undeniably Highsmith-esque about Philbrick’s story, such comparisons don’t do justice to Whitfield’s nuanced treatment of his old friend. For all of the lies and double dealing, Whitfield is a fair-minded narrator. It is hard to totally dispense sympathy for someone you’ve known for your entire adult life. But his old friends’ crimes were not victimless: lives were ruined and savings pots destroyed. “I had been of a mind – of a desire – to believe that… [it] was a case of a rich young man stealing from other rich people in some bathetic version of Robin Hood. It wasn’t true.” Today, Philbrick is a free and mostly unchastened man, at least according to a recent tell-all in the Sunday Times. Good business is, he opined, impossible without ambition. As for greed, nothing could be so natural. “I’d feel a lot more guilt if I had been drink-driving or if I’d been selling drugs and someone had died.”
All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art
Orlando Whitfield
Profile Books, 336pp, £20
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[See also: The fine art of bullshitting – and why we’re getting better at it]
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