A quarterly column, steady as ever
“And yet all his crimes seem to be a quite straightforward consequence of the way the contemporary art market operates: borderline criminality is baked in.”
Books read:
- All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art—Orlando Whitfield
- All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me—Patrick Bringley
- Other books to be discussed at a later date
Books bought:
- All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art—Orlando Whitfield
- All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me—Patrick Bringley
- The Ladies’ Paradise—Émile Zola
- Headshot—Rita Bullwinkel
- The Spinning House: How Cambridge University Locked Up Women in Its Private Prison—Caroline Biggs
- All I Ever Wanted: A Rock ’n’ Roll Memoir—Kathy Valentine
I am very worried that I am about to fogey-ize myself. It was bound to happen eventually, I guess. I have been amazingly cool for a long time, as you of all people, dear Believer readers, can testify, but one of the two books I have recently read about art has pushed me over the edge into disapproving old age, and I doubt there’s any coming back. The two books are Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World and Orlando Whitfield’s All That Glitters. The former is about the art collected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the latter is about the contemporary art market. So two books about art that begin with the word all, but only one contains the word beauty; the other is a shorthand warning about money. All the Beauty in the World is, yes, beautiful, but also wise and sad; All That Glitters made me feel a bit sick.
It’s not Orlando Whitfield’s fault; not really. His book is compelling, with a real villain, an art dealer called Inigo Philbrick, at its center, and you may recall the name. Philbrick was arrested in 2020 for fraud and jailed for seven years. He was released in early 2024, after serving four of them. All That Glitters is the story of Whitfield’s relationship with Philbrick, from the time they studied together at Goldsmiths in London until the time of Philbrick’s disappearance, when it all got to be too much for him—he had told too many lies, promised too many things to too many people, owed too much money. And yet, all his crimes seem to be a quite straightforward consequence of the way the contemporary art market operates: borderline criminality is baked in.
Here is how Philbrick and Whitfield operated. Walking home one evening, Philbrick spots what is now known to everyone as “a Banksy,” a piece of street art on a pair of metal doors. It depicts a rat wearing a baseball cap and carrying a beatbox. He sends a photo to Whitfield, who joins him at the site, and they plan what to do—because, of course, something has to be done. You can’t just leave it there for the enjoyment or indifference of passing foot traffic. The next morning, Philbrick hears back from a London auction house, and his contact there tells him that the auction house would pay eighty grand for it. This is right at the beginning, before the beginning, even, of our protagonists’ careers as gallerists in the art world. They are both still students.
If Banksy’s rat belongs to anyone, apart from the public, then it belongs to the owners of the building, so Philbrick suggests they bung the building manager fifteen grand and pay to replace the doors. They don’t have the fifteen grand, of course, but that doesn’t seem to matter. A conversation with the night manager is unsatisfactory. They show him what they are interested in doing, but he won’t let them speak to his boss. And before they know it, the Banksy is gone and the doors are being replaced. Philbrick calls Whitfield. “They fucked us! The fuckers. They fucking fucked us, dude. The door. It’s fucking gone.” I am not sure that Philbrick and Whitfield were fucking fucked, really. The thing they wanted to steal was stolen by someone else, is all.
But this is a world full of thieves, chancers, con artists. An artist called Adam installs a glass divider in their gallery—that is his entire show. (“A previous show of his, in New York, consisted of a woman he hired from Craigslist to travel to the vicinity of the gallery twice a week. No one but the woman knew when or if she would be there.”) When the billionaire collector Marc Steinberg sent his business manager to do an audit of the art fund Philbrick ran for him, Philbrick had to reproduce one of the works of art, because he’d sold the original, and the money had been “transferred out of the fund.” Luckily, the artwork in question was a bunch of rubber welcome mats, so Philbrick sourced a hundred of the same ones from a hardware store and re-created the piece. He got away with it. The business manager “had no idea what the fuck he was looking at,” Philbrick said, chortling, but one has sympathy for the guy. Who can tell, really, which rubber welcome mats are phony and which are real?
Did you know it was possible to own only a percentage of an artwork? I was naive enough to believe that if you purchased something, it was yours, but the rich don’t do things like that. They are interested only in the value of a thing, not in the thing itself. (And the value of most contemporary art is created and then inflated entirely by the important art dealers. Did you ever have the dream that a piece of art by a young artist you bought would, over the course of time, become worth a lot more than you paid for it? Well, it won’t. Not unless Jay Jopling, founder of the uber-influential gallery White Cube, or Larry Gagosian, says so.)
Sometimes you can own 50 percent of a piece, or more, or less. Does that mean you have to hand it over every few months to its co-owner, so they can put it on their wall? No, of course not. They are not interested in displaying the art, just as they are not interested in displaying their hedge funds, so it sits around in a climate-controlled customs warehouse. One of Philbrick’s crimes was to sell more than 100 percent of an artwork. On at least one occasion, co-owners thought their painting was in their warehouse. It is amazing how important the “post-conceptual” artist Christopher Wool—whose works are worth several million—is to their schemes. Wool’s work often consists of large words on a canvas. HYPOCRITE. AUTHORITY. PRANKSTER. They do not, to my mind, reveal their meanings slowly.
The book describes the fever-inducing relationship between Philbrick and Whitfield, from college to prison. Whitfield is clearly not cut out for the task of lying to and stealing from the superrich. He’s too thoughtful, and his mental health suffers, and he ends up in a hospital with a Xanax addiction. But for a long time there was a part of him that wanted to be Philbrick, whose unaffordable lifestyle (private jets, clubs, villas, Miami galleries) is of no interest to us here at Believer Towers, right? Whitfield pulls himself out of it eventually, and now works in a world that is in every way the opposite of the bizarre universe of White Cube: he helps restore works of art, painstakingly and with love. “Why did you do this?” the federal judge asked Philbrick at his trial. “‘For money, Your Honour,’ Inigo replied.’ ‘That simple?’ ‘That simple.’” Depressingly, this is an answer that a great many people in this book, dealers and artists, would give, if they were honest.
