Inigo Philbrick has completed his sentence of incarceration, which is fortuitous timing for him, as he will be able to bathe in the reception for this book, a sparkling, wry memoir in which he plays the role of the cherubic antagonist at the heart of a real-life narrative that splices Goodfellas with Gilbert & George.
The brief outline is this: Philbrick, an American art dealer based in London and specialising in secondary market sales, commits various fraudulent acts, conning some extraordinarily powerful clients in the process. He flees Miami with his fiancée, Victoria Baker-Harber, a regular on the TV show Made in Chelsea, and holes himself up in Vanuatu, from where he taunts his creditors via anonymous Instagram accounts. Then, in July 2020, he is caught by the FBI and flown back to the US.
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I have been waiting to read the full story for some time: I briefly met Philbrick, who is now 36, in 2011, when a friend of mine was working with him. He was outfitted with an easy-going nature and an indeterminate mid-Atlantic accent. Like everyone else, I was immediately fascinated by him. I remember thinking: ‘How does a man just six months older than me have their own gallery in Mount Street?’
Over the next few years, as pals in the art world stuttered through auction house assistant roles, it was astonishing to observe the meteoric rise of the millennial Larry Gagosian. Then it all came crashing down.
If there is one person who should tell Inigo Philbrick’s story, it is Orlando Whitfield, who befriended the American when they were undergraduates at Goldsmiths and has spent 15 years under Philbrick’s spell, working with him and then under him as their paths merged, diverged and then descended. Indeed, this book was written in the flat Whitfield and Philbrick used to share in Camberwell and benefits from a massive cache of emails – and previously unreported details – that Philbrick sent his old pal while he was on the lam in the South Pacific.
All That Glitters: a portrait of friendship
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The result, All That Glitters, is less a journalistic investigation and more a portrait of a friendship. We read that Philbrick is a devastatingly good mimic, a devoted fan of the Fast and Furious franchise and a supernaturally talented hustler who a lot of people in the art world (including Whitfield’s father) always suspected would end up in jail.
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He is funny, but also callous and cruel – dumping his friends, abandoning his first fiancée and their child. But so charming! He dazzled the major players of the art world: the famously touchy duo, Gilbert & George, were delighted with him. The high-minded set, too: Norman Rosenthal, the curator and historian whose vaunted taste anointed Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst and the rest of the YBAs in the Nineties, is taken for slap-up meals at Scott’s. Sacha Craddock, the critic and committee chair of the Bloomberg Young Contemporaries, even invited Inigo to live in her genteel squat/gallery in the heart of Bloomsbury, and he duly lived in her basement for two years, hosting soirées where guests would sit to discuss art and snort cocaine.
Why did he do it? Kenny Schachter, a former business partner whom Philbrick defrauded of $1.5 million, blames a ‘toxic mix of arrogance and alcohol’. Philbrick, whose father is a renowned museum director, tells Whitfield of a childhood encounter with the legendary New York dealer, Leo Castelli, that acts as the touchpaper for his own vast ambitions and enables him to turn his back on the shabbily genteel world in which he was raised. No warm white wine in paper cups for Philbrick. That won’t do.
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One of the many ways in which All That Glitters succeeds is in the gradual realisation that dawns on Whitfield as he comes to terms with the extent of his friend’s fraud, on a criminal level, and also on a personal one, and how that started to corrupt him. Working as a dealer with another company, Whitfield comes to understand that his primary role is as ‘a hired friend and London concierge’ for wealthy, older gay men.
The tramlines of wealth and class and nationality are relayed with a high level of exactitude. There’s a particularly amusing scene with an American executive postulating about the purpose of a cummerbund, and the book shines brightest with the arrival of Hugo de Ferranti, a partially sighted art dealer (yes, really) with whom Whitfield and Philbrick have a number of near-botched business deals over meals of ‘fish nearing extinction’ on and around Berkeley Square.
‘Veritable masterpiece’
In May 2022, when Philbrick was sentenced to 84 months in prison (since reduced), I thought it would be high time to attempt a piece on him and the crepuscular world of the art adviser, an industry that had mushroomed in London this century (and with precious little in the way of journalistic endeavour to try to understand it).
With Philbrick safely locked up, I reasoned, my various insiders would spill the beans and I would have a pretty decent article on my hands. Well, of course, the level of omertà operating in the London art world would surprise even a Cosa Nostra capo. No one I spoke with would give me even a scrap of intel to work with. It is to Whitfield’s immense credit as a first-time author that he has managed to unpick this byzantine world with such clarity and insight.
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There is a compelling passage in which Whitfield posits the theory that ‘the financial crisis of 2008 had a role to play in the hothouse conditions of the art world over the ensuing years’. As financiers had their wings clipped, they headed to the auction rooms and galleries to get a casino thrill from an industry that is totally unregulated.
As a guide to ‘the gooey layers of absurdity and frivolous late capitalism that the international art scene now embodies’, All That Glitters is a veritable masterpiece.
All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art by Orlando Whitfield (Profile Books, £20; from 2 May)
This feature first appeared in Spear’s Magazine: Issue 91. Click here to subscribe
