Of course, only in a work of satirical fiction could an ambitious, friendly and ruthless young art dealer be called “Inigo Philbrick”. But no: one of the remarkable aspects of Orlando Whitfield’s book is that Inigo Philbrick actually exists. All That Glitters is an account of how the author’s student friendship with Philbrick led to the duo entering the shark-infested waters of the contemporary art market at an early age.
Inigo and Orlando started a business together; me and O Fine Art. Whitfield is the uptight one, Philbrick is the risk-taker, the high-flyer. As the amount of money involved grows, their paths diverge. While Philbrick ends up in prison in America, Whitfield’s collision with the great nexus of art and money eventually lands him in a psychiatric hospital. Whitfield’s only consolation is that the experience provided excellent material for a memoir, and he took full advantage of it. He has written an extremely readable and insightful account of how contemporary art is bought and sold.
Art dealers are, in Delacroix’s words, purveyors of fantasy. When what they’re selling is new and unproven, and the buyers are rich and greedily gullible, it’s hard to resist the opportunity to take advantage of the situation. What is a work of contemporary art really worth? Whitfield describes how a work that the owner had consigned to a dealer for sale for $400,000 sold within a few hours for $600,000 after two or three middlemen gleefully charged it with their commissions (or, in business parlance, “lolly was allowed a lick”). ”).
There are many moving moments in Whitfield’s narrative. One of them is a Goldman Sachs trader admiringly listing things that are forbidden for him in trading but commonplace in buying and selling works of art: acting on inside information, artificially inflating prices, choosing who to sell to. Moreover, Whitfield continues, “Prices are rarely openly displayed, ownership of works is often shrouded in legal mystery, deals are often signed with little more than a handshake, and works are stored in bonded warehouses and free ports allowing speculators to avoid enormous amounts of taxes.”
So is this a market crying out for regulation? Readers will draw their own conclusions. My own experience shows that this is a commercial arena where persuasion skills have become extremely important, and some auction houses today prefer to employ dealers rather than experts. “I don’t paint brushstrokes,” an auction house expert told me recently. “I only make dollars.” The old art trade adage has never been more true: A successful seller is someone who can sell a painting he doesn’t like to a buyer who doesn’t want it.
Some might say the art business has always been this way. But this is not entirely true: never before has contemporary art dominated the art market as much as it does today. And never before has contemporary art taken a form so conducive to charlatanism. This does not mean that extraordinary works of contemporary art have not been produced in the 21st century. There are also some pretty weak things that are simply inflated in value by manipulative elements in the art trade, and sometimes it’s not easy to tell the difference.
Philbrick’s rise and fall was spectacular. Given the obviousness of his fraud (such as selling the same painting to three different buyers at the same time) why didn’t he finish the job quicker? Lying can have the effect of destabilizing reality, the author says: “As I tried to make sense of the tangle of deals that led to Philbrick’s downfall, I was struck by how in their lack of transparency they seemed to point to something larger. The manic complexity of Philbrick’s plan now seems to me like the art market as a whole; willful, willful uncertainty as a modus operandi.”
Art dealers need money to survive, the rich need art to survive. This is the reciprocal dynamic that drives the market and brings art dealers into close contact with very rich people indeed. This experience can be disconcerting, and for some dealers it is difficult to resist the temptation to embrace their customers’ lifestyle. Private jets, fast cars, exclusive restaurants and unlimited champagne were embraced with great enthusiasm by Philbrick. In the end, it all proved disastrously beyond his means.
Whitfield is an insightful narrator, and his book is written in a spirit of blame rather than remorse for the actions of his former friend and partner. But he needs to tread carefully, because Philbrick worked closely with some of the contemporary art market’s leading players in his glory days, and the draft of All That Glitters must have kept Profile Books’ legal team on their toes. At least Whitfield has now swum away from the sharks. He is no longer an art dealer, but is embarking on a new career as a writer. On the evidence of this book, it will be successful.
Philip Hook is the former director of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art department. All That Glitters is published by Profile, priced at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit: Telegram Books