‘To be a good art dealer you need to be both prescient and manipulative’ writes Orlando Whitfield whose memoir ‘All That Glitters’ recounts the heady ascent and sharp fall that he and Inigo Philbrick experienced as they shot through into the much-too-rich beating heart of the art market, not to be mistaken with the art world.
The book has several layers, the ground is a coming of age story of friends, the liminal period between youth and adulthood where there is an opportunity to forge a future of your design. The juicy core is the detail around brokering, where and how the money flows. And then there’s the fallout. As Whitfield writes at the outset, the best and worst thing about the art market is that it’s unregulated.
Both men had privileged upbringings. Whitfield’s father worked at Christie’s (mainly antique furniture and Renaissance bronzes) but Philbrick’s parents had the contemporary edge. His father was director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in the USA and mother a Harvard-educated artist and later also teacher at Parsons in New York, he was keyed into the contemporary American art scene. While Whitfield felt awkward and starstruck in a creative room, Philbrick was initiated and charming. Frank Stella had even been his one-time babysitter.
The two met at 19 at Goldsmiths’ College, bonding quickly over shared interests and probably a sense of what one could do for the other. So with a palette of youthful exuberance, connections and some cocaine fuelled nights of cultural discourse they got on the same page and decided (then only as art-history students) to become art-dealers. For a while they strode in pace but their relationship as friends and in business quickly became arrhythmic with Whitfield plagued by a sense of foreboding and Philbrick bullish at the potential of profiting from art.
The opening chapters (and book) are so beguiling that it’s easy to become a voyeur in the schemes, which is possibly indicative of how Whitfield and Philbrick moved so deftly for a time at face-value.
They, mostly Philbrick, fell in with an older set of bohemians and the very wealthy in London. The scene was set to make some money and cash greased the wheel for all involved. Their maiden deal sets sail at a posh dinner party. A Paula Rego artwork (famous female 20th and 21st century painter) would leave its London collector, the money tipped to pay for some school fees, to a mysterious French buyer. So, the young men fly to Lisbon to sell the work eschewing and therefore eluding customs and make the sale. But something doesn’t sit right with Whitfield. Here is the first of many moments in which Whitfield notices that Philbrick is more dialled in to operations and feels himself party to an ‘economy of truth’ which bemuses and hurts him.
However, as Whitfield writes ‘What Inigo seemed to understand almost innately was that secrecy meant control. The art market is like a stock market where all the shares and their owners are secret. Holding something back, however small, is therefore a potential source of leverage, of power … It filled me with fear, but as usual I did nothing, said nothing. But from that moment we were never equals again. He won because he knew how. I let him because I didn’t.’
There are other anecdotes like this in the book, even Banksy gets a mention. The complexity of the deals are increasing, stakes getting higher, wealth more obscene. You get the picture, the forecast is for it to pop-off, and it will for one of them.
In their postgraduate days, Whitfield’s got a fledgling career in publishing as Philbrick’s star rises in Jay Jopling’s international White Cube team. A ‘gulf of maturity’ grows between them. Whitfield is pulled back into Philbrick’s orbit and dealings, to his detriment.
What follows is a crash landing.
Whitfield has a breakdown and some time later Philbrick is on the lam before being arrested in Vanuatu. The FBI charged him with fraud for dealing in the ‘secondary’ market, reselling art (which was already owned by someone else) to individual collectors who would be grouped together to invest in high-value works. Philbrick was dubbed by artist and writer Kenny Schachter (who lost a significant amount of money to him) as ‘the art world’s mini-Madoff’, riding the wave of investors looking at art as an asset class.
As Whitfield began to heal his mental health, he wrote. Philbrick served time in prison (you can read his dispatches published in Vanity Fair here) and while away his second-child was born. For Whitfield this memoir came to be and it seems that Philbrick will be behind a media presence of his own, as he hinted in a Tatler profile with his glamorous partner.
All That Glitters is very engaging. It’s an at times unflattering portrait of remarkable people and their journey. Whitfield was obviously destined to be a writer. He is an artist not a salesman.