In his 2023 New Yorkers In his profile of the legendarily ruthless art dealer and preening silverback Larry Gagosian, Patrick Radden Keefe quotes a top-tier international collector. The world of art collecting, the source admits, can be depressing. “(They) don’t really say, ‘Oh, that’s an incredible painting and the colors are fabulous and it was influenced by Renoir.’ It’s more, ‘Well, that costs seven million dollars, but Steve Cohen bought one that sold for seven and a half, and there’s one that’s going to auction that could go for nine.’ Sometimes they forget that it’s Art.”
When I first approached, I thought Everything that glittersthe memoir of self-described “recovering” art dealer Orlando Whitfield, would contain predictable delights. An insider’s gossipy revelation of a noxious, absurdly self-centered world populated by a rotating cast of international grotesques – the greedy artists, cynical gallery owners and irresponsible, chronically insecure private collectors who keep the whole circus afloat. A piece of gleeful eat-the-rich satire that ploughs through, as Whitefield puts it, “the sticky layers of absurdity and frivolous late capitalism that the international art scene embodies today.”
But Whitfield’s book isn’t just a cross between Sidebar of Shame and Frieze Miami—it also reaches greater emotional depths. In 2006, Whitfield began studying art history at Goldsmiths College, hoping that southeast London would promise more excitement than his solidly middle-class English upbringing (his father was chief executive of London auction house Christie’s) had allowed him. There he met Inigo Philbrick, a handsome, erudite and well-connected young American who had a penchant for long lecture halls on the writings of Arthur Danto and the gender politics of Lee Lozano. “Things that no one else in the class had ever heard of, let alone had a defensible opinion on.” Although it took some time, the two ambitious young men became almost inseparable. Their long-standing friendship went through many phases—from joy to painful despair—on the way to its final breakdown.
While Whitfield was destined to remain a “bottom-of-the-pack” art dealer, Inigo Philbrick seemed destined for stardom. While still in his early twenties, he became a protégé of Jay Jopling, the extraordinarily London fixer and founder of the White Cube Gallery. By the age of thirty, Philbrick was a sensation, regularly closing multimillion-dollar deals involving some of the world’s most famous artists and wealthiest, most secretive collectors. At 34, he was sentenced to seven years in an American prison for planning an extraordinarily complex fraud worth tens of millions of dollars. In 2022, the Guardian reported on his $86 million schemes, including “selling more than 100 percent of a work of art to multiple investors without their knowledge, using works as collateral for loans without informing co-owners, and falsifying documents to inflate the value of works of art.” Why had such a promising young man thrown away his future, the judge wondered at the subsequent trial? “For the money, Your Honor,” Philbrick had replied.
Orlando Whitfield is able to provide a more in-depth answer. The story begins in their student days, after a summer trip to a New York gallery together. Wasn’t the commercial gallery world where things really happened? Perhaps they could work together to do some deals. Their first success involved a Paula Rego watercolor belonging to a drunken London art scene star. After recruiting a well-connected Iberian fellow student, a Portuguese buyer was found. Weeks later, Whitfield and Philbrick were on a budget flight to Lisbon at 6am. In the borderline corporate hotel, Whitfield drowned his nerves with a double whiskey while Philbrick remained a picture of calm. The deal, which involved a flowery, chain-smoking, middle-aged gallery owner, earned the two budding students a £3,000 commission. “Was that really work?” Whitfield remembers being astonished. “Is this what art dealers do?” As he boarded the flight home, his excitement knew no bounds. “I think we both imagined it would be like this for the rest of our lives.”
The innocence, relative as it may be, is soon dispelled by experience, told through some winning scenes, including an absurd attempt to unstick a Banksy mural from a London wall. As Philbrick’s star rises to lofty heights, the two go their separate ways professionally, one gets the feeling, to Whitfield’s subconscious relief. Over the next few years, Whitfield shuttles between publishing and his own comparatively modest ventures as an art dealer, as well as a stint as an associate at one of Philbrick’s seemingly endless ventures. The two remained close friends. Whitfield could see the noose around his friend’s neck slowly tightening long before the final disaster, even if he was powerless to prevent it. When Philbrick is on the run from the police, it is Whitfield to whom he confides via email. Even this gesture is not straightforward. “I think 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 live in a golden age of conman fiction. Our collective, seemingly insatiable thirst for stories of crooks and conmen has taken us to some strange places in the past decade, from the epic gloom of the Fyre Festival’s porta-potties to the boardrooms of corporate America. The success of such a story depends in part on the characters that underpin it. And Philbrick is a compelling contrast, a hypermodern cautionary tale about the decline of talent and charm into moral corruption. Whitfield is a sympathetic Virgil in our descent into the relentless, mindless decadence of the contemporary art world: a world in which Philbrick is by no means a renegade outsider.
It’s a world where illusions matter as much as hard cash. What Philbrick, or any rising star worth his bill at the Connaught hotel bar, must quickly understand is the centrality of the dream. Access, Whitfield explains – to the most exclusive cultural gatekeepers, the hottest young artists and, above all, the richest collectors – is everything: “The heady, intangible and priceless X-factor… that has kept the market as buoyant as an oligarch’s yacht.” Philbrick knew this from the start. “Soon I had grown used to Inigo,” Whitfield writes, “who seemed to already know everyone worth knowing in this new world of beauty and money, and kept me away from people he wanted to avoid.”
The more I read, the more I thought of Dennis Potter’s famous interview with Melvyn Bragg, a few weeks before Bragg died of cancer in June 1994. “We should always look back on our own past with a kind of tender contempt. As long as there is tenderness, but please let there be some contempt too.” Look, he sighed, at how thoughtlessly we go through the world, “how we struggle and push and shove and sometimes use big words to cover it up.” How easy and natural it is to see greed or pride as other people’s sins, never our own.
I was curious to see how Whitfield would navigate this tonal minefield: it would be easy to overdo the disdain. Certainly there is something airily grotesque in the endless merry-go-round of £2,000 Mayfair lunches and transatlantic flights that he describes, “the hamster wheel of dinners and parties and studio visits and fairs and auctions”. But that glamour is also undeniably seductive. And there are moments of fleeting transcendence too. The book’s moral counterweight comes from its supporting cast, including Piers Townshend, a wonderfully avuncular painting restorer who took Whitfield under his temporary care after a mental health crisis in 2017.
Critics will no doubt classify Inigo Philbrick as another contemporary Ripley, standing 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 do not do justice to Whitfield’s nuanced treatment of his old friend. For all the lies and duplicity, Whitfield is a fair narrator. It is hard to have complete sympathy for someone you have known all your adult life. But his old friends’ crimes were not without victims: lives were ruined and savings wiped out. “I was of the opinion – of the desire – to believe that … (it) was a case of a rich young man stealing from other rich people, in some pathetic version of Robin Hood. It was not true.” Today, Philbrick is a free and largely unbridled man, at least according to a recent exposé in the Sunday NewsIn his opinion, good business is not possible without ambition. And as far as greed goes, nothing could be more natural. “I would feel much more guilty if I had driven drunk or sold drugs and someone had died.”
Everything That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Betrayal and Fine Art
Orlando Whitfield
Profile books, 336 pages, £20
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(See also: The fine art of bullshit – and why we are getting better at it)
