In this time when the world seems full of darkness, both natural and political, I have been distracting myself by reading Orlando Whitfield’s new book All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art (Pantheon Press). The fraud was committed by Whitfield’s American friend, Inigo Philbrick, whom he met at Goldsmith’s, a college of the University of London. From the earliest days of their friendship, Whitfield was fascinated by Philbrick’s ability to soak up art market information and to form highly advantageous art-world relationships with seemingly effortless ease.
Whitfield portrays himself as a sort of Robin to Philbrick’s Batman as they begin a gallery together. In short order, however, Philbrook has moved far ahead of his friend, leaving their joint effort to work for one of London’s premier contemporary dealers. He is raking in the big bucks, his cellphone constantly buzzing with the details of complicated transactions involving artworks which trade for millions of pounds.
It’s a world of Billionaires and Beautiful People who spend the year traveling on their private jets to art fairs around the world. Their only respite seems to come in December after the close of Miami Basel, when they all knock off to go skiing in St. Moritz. Artworks are bought, sold, and then resold for enormous prices, even though the buyers often do not even see the works in person; instead, the works are moved from the seller’s space to the buyer’s space at some duty-free warehouse outside Geneva.
Whitfield occasionally gets invited to a reception like a poor relation, or he enjoys lunch with his friend at an exclusive club, reminiscing with Philbrick between urgent texts arriving on the latter’s phone. Philbrick knows everyone, it seems, and has his finger precisely on the market, knowing which artist will get hot next and who’s passé. He doesn’t deal in any artists whose works don’t sell for at least six figures.
But it’s an artificial world, in every sense of the word, and Philbrick has forgotten, if he ever knew it, the number one truth about the art world: “Any dealer who mistakes his clients’ lifestyle for his own is in for big trouble.” Philbrook is staking big money from investors on things that have no inherent value. Whitfield sums things up neatly after relating the story of his selling an artwork to Philbrook, all the time lying to him about the fact that the “privately-owned” painting had come from another dealer they both knew:
But, as much as we were all lying to each other, we were also all engaged in a collective act of self-delusion: deliberately choosing not to question whether these things are worth these enormous sums of money, that the market can value them in advance of history’s verdict. The money that has been injected into the contemporary art market can only ever be seen as speculative at its core. Because, unlike tradable concrete assets like timber or grain, trading artworks is always trading futures in the hopes that fashion will dictate their continuing rise in value; necessity, that keystone of economic forces, does not apply. This makes the art market widely unstable: vast sums of money change hands, often sealed by little more than a handshake, for assets that have no intrinsic value and whose quality has been decided by an international phalanx of tastemakers whose quixotic desires serve only their own ends. Woe betide the art market when the apocalypse arrives.
