The best thing about art is that it’s not necessary. The worst thing about art is that it’s not necessary. The art market knows that we don’t need to buy these things, these objects, these artefacts: works that could be beautiful, ugly, important, insignificant, honest, bullshit, good-natured, cynical – it doesn’t really matter, at a certain level.

For one thing, no one ever sees a good chunk of the most expensive artworks in the world – not least their owners, who transfer them from Swiss freeport to Swiss freeport in anonymous, air-conditioned boxes. For another, their value – which is to say, their modern meaning – is very often so far removed from their artistic intention or aesthetic impact as to become completely arbitrary. It is a number crafted and honed by a small cabal of people who have vested interests so gargantuan that if they were in any other industry we’d call it what it is: a racket, a pit of insider trading, a fraud, a farce.	

Unlike speculating on aluminium futures or Pepsi stock, in the 

 “there is no there there”, as Gertrude Stein once wrote about Los Angeles. Yes, the paintings traded often have substance, heft, brushstrokes, sweat and blood in them. But really, as Orlando Whitfield puts it, in his remarkable book 

, artworks are “wildly unstable assets of no intrinsic value”. Their price, essentially, is dictated by some assumption of future taste, itself perhaps dictated by an assumption of a future price, and all of this dictated by the whims and eyebrows of a few dozen people in Loro Piana Open Walks. There’s a quote on the frontispiece of the book from the writer Peter Schjeldahl that sums it all up neatly: “The art market is a fever chart. Its zigs and zags call less for explanation than for diagnosis.” The central question in 

, perhaps, is whether a chap like Inigo Philbrick might be the virus itself, or simply a symptom of the wider disease.

I first wrote about Inigo Philbrick in February 2020, as a member of a cottage racket of my own – a hack on the fruitful Rich People Behaving Badly beat. Back then, he was a rogue at-large, a cherub on the lam: a figure of almost literary intrigue (that name!) who stood accused of perpetrating the biggest art fraud in history before disappearing off the face of the earth, or at least out of Mayfair (same thing, actually). He might have been in Miami, I wrote, or maybe Thailand, or perhaps South America, or maybe Australia. I don’t know where I got those places from now – probably the fuzzy hive-mind of borrowed reporting that emerged in the early days of 2020 as soon as the story broke. As it turns out, Philbrick was laying low-ish in Vanuatu, the remote Pacific island. He was arrested in June 2020 while strolling through a local market in a linen shirt and a pair of swimming trunks, and extradited that same day by FBI Air to the US, where he was soon schlepped over to the prison in which Jeffrey Epstein had died a year earlier. Philbrick was accused of forging documents, selling paintings without their owners’ consent, faking identities, fabricating phoney customers, and shilling fractional shares in single artworks that added up to far more than 100 per cent – all to the tune of around $90m. Kenny Schachter, an art-world writer who had worked very closely with Philbrick (and was ultimately scammed by him), described his friend as a “Mini- Madoff” and “

Philbrick’s portrait – placid and calm, like a shark in auburn curls – stared out from a dozen feature pages enigmatically. He was sentenced at the end of 2020 and imprisoned for seven years, and when the judge came to ask him why he did it, he said, simply, “For money, Your Honour.” And that, for a while, seemed to be that. But really, those pieces were just glossing the surface of some deep, dark waters. Amid all the salacious and yet bland reporting (of which I was trying palely to be a part) a few questions seemed to go unanswered and unanswerable. What kind of person was Inigo Philbrick? What was the mindset and motivation of a man who could get himself quite so tangled up in such a devious, elaborate, colourful fraud? And wouldn’t you quite like to give it all a go too?

“I soon realised that if I was going to write a book about me in the art market, it was impossible to write it without Inigo. And if I was going to write a book about Inigo, it would have been impossible to write a full picture of him without talking about how I knew him”

Whitfield’s book satisfies a great deal of that delicious curiosity, while sowing the seeds of a great deal more. We meet to discuss it at The Guinea Grill in Mayfair, about 100 yards from the auctioneer Phillips – one of the big three houses that looms large but unknowable, like some grand, distant uncle, throughout the action of the book. We share the porterhouse steak, and at some points during our conversation I find myself inclined to hush my voice, or to look over my shoulder to see who might be in the room, lest Larry Gagosian himself had wandered in for a Thursday afternoon Guinness. This is silly, of course, but only slightly. Whitfield himself admits to a sense of having betrayed some shady omerta in writing the book – an unspoken honour code that is part boarding school, part mafia. “No one ever said this to me directly,” Whitfield says, “but I know through friends who are in that world still, that some people have been really shocked. People saying, ‘One simply doesn’t 

this’ – that sort of thing. But you know: what do I owe this world? I mean, it’s a market, it’s not a person. I wasn’t cut out for it – but why shouldn’t I write about it? It’s quite mad.”

A lot of the book does concern a person, though. A person who may be a stand-in for a market, in some ways, but a person nonetheless. Whitfield had initially intended to write an insider’s book about the art world in general, with perhaps a chapter hooked on Philbrick. “But I soon realised that if I was going to write a book about me in the art market, it was impossible to write it without Inigo. And if I was going to write a book about Inigo, it would have been impossible to write a full picture of him without talking about how I knew him.” And so our way into this Wild West comes through their friendship, ultimately, and later their shared and competing business endeavours. The pair first met at Goldsmiths university in London, the historic petri dish of the Young British Artists, where Philbrick cut a debonair, oddly mature figure in a tucked-in shirt and a leather jacket that had belonged to his father. “He stuck out like a Hollywood smile at a coal miners’ strike,” writes Whitfield, and spoke with an “I-couldn’t-care- less-what-you-think attitude.” Both boys had family links to the art world: Whitfield’s father was an auctioneer at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and Philbrick’s was a director of a respected museum in Connecticut. Both also dipped their toes into the market early on, during their university days: Whitfield with an internship at Christie’s, and Philbrick with a placement at the White Cube gallery, owned by the towering, thick-spectacled Jay Jopling, who had helped launched the careers of the YBAs and done rather nicely out of it.

From here, a riptide of charisma and chutzpah seemed to drag Philbrick out into some pretty deep waters pretty quickly, via a few early splashes as a mini-dealer alongside Whitfield. The two made business cards embossed with the name I and O Fine Art, and minted a nifty early deal over a Paula Rego painting, which they sold in Lisbon for a profit of about €3,000 in a blur of bullshit and other people’s booze. Back in their hotel room, they ordered room service champagne and “did that thing you see in hip-hop videos of throwing a pile of cash into the air”. Later, Philbrick and Whitfield attempted to buy a metal door that they believed to be emblazoned with an original Banksy, only for the owner to cut them out of the deal once he realised what he had. A similar thing happened with a brick wall a few months later, again sprayed with a Banksy. The pair were told that they’d arrived just a few hours too late, and that a “German fella” had offered to buy the brickwork for £1,000. A couple of years later, the piece was valued at £300,000.

Numbers like that have a certain thrill to them, even second-hand. Throughout the book – and with one eye on your own salary of wordrate – it is hard not to be enticed by the insouciance with which a couple of hundred thousand can be apparently magicked from thin air. Art dealing sometimes appears to have the air of a get-rich-quick scheme, albeit one leavened from ickiness with cultural cachet and lunches at Cipriani. (Perhaps Philbrick would have been a crypto evangelist if he’d been born a few years later.) A work consigned for $400,000 suddenly becomes worth $600,000 once the right dealers have passed it back and forth. Later on in the book, Whitfield lands a healthy deal himself, selling Philbrick a Christopher Wool work for a profit of $50,000 in a negotiation that lasts “less than half a minute” and that ends with the excellent line “my friend here would like to see the dessert trolley”. I have read somewhere that 

, while partially intended as a cautionary tale, actually had the unintended effect of increasing applications to hedge funds and financial institutions, especially to a cohort of young men applying for poorly paid jobs in the wake of the 2008 crash. (Cocaine-induced meltdown or drudgery-induced meltdown? At least the first has helicopters in it.) In the current climate, does Whitfield wonder whether his book – and all the rompy tales of Philbrick in general – might do something similar?

“I had never thought that my book might work as a recruiting tool,” he laughs. “If some anonymous kid in five years’ time reads my book and goes, ‘Well, this is what I want to do with my life’, then either they are entirely foolhardy and they will probably make a great success of it, or they didn’t read my book right. Good luck to them, is all I’m saying.”

For all their closeness – “No-one could make me laugh like Inigo” – and their shared love of art, Whitfield acknowledges that he and Philbrick were just “wired differently” for the job and the market. Whitfield remembers an early deal when he was kept waiting in a gallery for days, missing his sister’s birthday, while an aloof buyer kept postponing the purchase of a work that was intended as a Christmas present for his wife. The buyer never showed up, and when Whitfield finally got through to him, simply told him, “Oh, I’ve already left the country.” He bought his wife a diamond instead. “I was immensely hurt by that deal, by the guy who didn’t turn up,” says Whitfield. “And Inigo realised that being hurt by something like that was entirely fucking useless. What was the point of being hurt? You had to just suck it up.” The stress and the anxiety – “the abject powerlessness” in a market of casual billions and handshake agreements – was almost the work itself, Philbrick seemed to reason. The hard price of the easy money when it finally came.		

“He talked about the FBI and the authorities as if they were an- other thing, happening to another person. Call it confidence, call it arrogance – whatever. But at a certain point, it’s very difficult to switch that off. It works very well when you’re moving forward, but when you stay still, it can act as a blindfold”

It’s this different ‘wiring ’, perhaps, that sees the pair’s paths diverge rapidly in the middle of the story. Philbrick seemed to swoop away from Whitfield in their mid-twenties, quickly becoming a sort of distant, enigmatic older-brother figure, his wrist thick with a Patek Philippe Nautilus. Jopling had quickly promoted Philbrick from White Cube to become an assistant collection manager at Modern Collections, his vehicle for his own private cache of art. Here, at the age of 23, Philbrick went from earning £35,000 a year to £35,000 a month, before Jopling backed him to set up his own gallery on Mount Street in Mayfair. (“TOO MUCH TOO YOUNG?” ran a headline in 

at the time, referring to the gallery and a recent run of success among young dealers in general.) Philbrick hired Whitfield to work for him at the Mount Street spot, in a role curating themes and brochures for the exhibitions, while Philbrick swanned around the world, largely uncontactable, in a haze of Dom Perignon and MDMA, and increasingly impressive deals. “He wore Milanese suits and Loro Piana shoes, and was driven in a blacked-out Mercedes,” Whitfield writes. “I cycled to work and wore my keys on a clip on my belt.”

Soon Whitfield struck out to run his own gallery with another partner, Ben Hunter. It was successful in its own right, but seemed to operate without the pyrotechnics of Philbrick’s dealmaking. By this point, many of Philbrick’s business relationships appeared to be fraying. Whitfield notes how “Inigo’s ability to form intense friendships with mostly male, mostly older art dealers was matched only by his willingness to let them fizzle and implode under the weight of exasperation and wilful neglect.” Philbrick seemed to treat his relationships like artworks or assets – things to be pumped and ultimately dumped. At the same time, Whitfield himself was unravelling in a fever dream of anxiety, artspeak and Xanax. Whitfield’s deal with Philbrick for the Christopher Wool piece, though agreed almost instantly, ended up slowly flaying his nerves – a sort of water-torture drip of adrenaline and half-truths. Philbrick delayed payment for the piece and went off-grid for weeks on end, putting Whitfield on the line for a £50,000 deposit he’d made to the seller – the loss of which would have meant professional bankruptcy as well as professional embarrassment. In 2018, terrified after staring for too long at a razorblade in the bath (“I reached for it, touched it, but couldn’t do the next thing ”), Whitfield called his therapist, who called his mother, who checked him into rehab.

“I was extremely depressed,” says Whitfield now. “Not a good year for me. It wasn’t something I was particularly excited to write about but I realised that it was a gap in my story. And that it detracted from the book not writing about it.” A few months later, Whitfield’s father died. One of the most striking images in the book occurs during the early days of Whitfield’s gallery career. On an opening night, in the hubbub and rush of the crowd, Whitfield spots his father through a break in the swirl of bodies. “What I saw in his face, for the first and only time, was pride,” Whitfield writes. “That’s where he remains, my father, an immovable and beaming star as the chaos spins around him.” I tell Whitfield I was struck by that moment, that realisation of his father’s pride among the bodies of his peers. “Perceived pride,” he corrects me. Theirs was a difficult relationship, he says. In his last days, Whitfield’s father looked at the runic tattoos that cover Whitfield’s hands and said, “You’re becoming so lower class.”

Whitfield says that his entry into the art world in general might have been a prolonged attempt, unconsciously, to gain his father’s approval – and that his relationship with Inigo was, in some ways, a replica of that. “Maybe this is just who I am,” Whitfield says. “This is a personality type that I was much too ready to please. And I tried to please both him and Inigo in roughly the same way. My father and Inigo were somehow analogous. I would have done anything for either of them, and yet I was never, ever going to get either of their approval.”

Philbrick, meanwhile, was slow- ly but surely “crossing the Rubicon” from usual art dealer jiggery-pokery into fuzzy criminality. His relationship with Jopling was souring, and though his bonhomie seemed mostly irrepressible, Whitfield sometimes noticed small twinges of sadness or worry amid the fizz. “We’d be drunk at the end of a long night out – he’d never go into any kind of full detail, but he would intimate how difficult things were,” says Whitfield. “There were moments when he was speaking to lawyers a lot more than would be the run-of-the-mill for someone doing what he does. But he’d never let it slip fully.” He reaches for a metaphor. “It was only ever the Covid mask dropping slightly down below the nose...”

Philbrick’s crimes and ruses were labyrinthine almost by design: so complicated that his clients and collectors would have no chance of unpicking them; so complex, as things spiralled out of control, perhaps, that he could scarcely understand them himself. One of his more notable ploys was in flogging fractional shares in an artwork to multiple parties, which added up to 220 per cent. At one point, Whitfield writes that he shipped two separate boxes to two different people who both thought they owned a single painting – one of the boxes containing the genuine artwork, one of them effectively empty. It says something about the mindless assets that many of these works have become that this basic ruse went entirely undetected. At another moment, Philbrick gets hold of a hugely damaged Rudolf Stingel painting from an insurance company that had meant to destroy it, and gets a team of amateur restorers to painstakingly revive it to its former glory in a rented garage in a Mayfair mews – a work of such alchemical dexterity as to almost be an artistic statement in itself. The Stingel, which officially didn’t even exist, was then allegedly sold for $1.75m. Whitfield points out that the whole affair makes a statement on authenticity, on restoration, and on artistic gatekeeping that is as punchy and lasting as any conceptual art piece. Perhaps one day, he wonders, it’ll be paraded by one of the great auction houses as a ‘Philbrick-Stingel’ – a forgery of notoriety and intrigue and ambiguity – and sold for ever more millions.

Tracking these various overlapping, intertwining scams is near-exhausting on the page. It must have been all-consuming in real life. One imagines that becoming an art fraudster is a bit like Hemingway’s evocation of going broke: gradually, and then suddenly. Whatever the pace, the trajectory seems to have been set by Philbrick’s desire to not just keep up with the ultra-rich, jet-set clients he sold to, but ultimately to surpass them. The global rich are the great, silent chorus in this book and in this market – their money the base fossil fuel that makes all the other heat and light and self-combustion possible. What is remarkable – or, perhaps, depressingly unremarkable – is how many of them on the margins of this tale really don’t seem to care about art at all. For many of them, a painting was just another bauble, and perhaps not even that – a bauble at least gets looked at for a bit. Just another acquisition. Just another thing. Something to do. Something to get.

“The reality of late capitalism is that you always want more of anything you can get,” Whitfield says, and he is very good on the bored, boring, surgically enhanced lifestyles of the super-rich. (One woman is described as having “a face made of icicles”.) Their unthinking inflation of the contemporary art market seems to be a corollary to other inflations in London-at-large in the past decade or so: namely inequality and house prices. If they’re after anything at all, really, Whitfield believes it is “access” – the means by which the art market works, and the goal to which the art market constantly aspires. “When you get to the top of the ladder, you find there is always another rung,” writes Whitfield. Anyone can buy a Lamborghini from a showroom. Not anyone can have Larry Gagosian sell them an Ed Ruscha. Oliver Bullough’s brilliant book from 2022, 

, describes how, as London lost its empire, its professional classes switched from being rulers in their own rights to becoming slick, genuflecting servants to a new cadre of global plutocrats. The art world, operated chiefly from the navy acreage of St James’s by a platoon of Hugos and Henriettas, is a significant part of this new service economy. Philbrick understood this dynamic intuitively, as well as the signifiers that greased its wheels, and so he peacocked his lifestyle accordingly, cutting around in private jets and renting villas in the Hamptons for eye-watering sums. It lent him a cachet among his clients, and also reassured them.	

“He had become one of them, one of the tribe, and no one suspects an attack from within,” says Whitfield. It was also his undoing. “For a while, Inigo was exactly as good as the money he was making,” says Whitfield. “And it was legitimate. But at a certain point, he wanted maybe more. And he would have got it. That’s the sad thing about the whole story.” Pushed to ever greater heights, Philbrick went several steps too far. The butler had gotten too big for his brogues. Small lies begat big lies begat small crimes begat big crimes. But in the thick of Philbrick’s decline, there is still a funny sense that he might just put all right, might just make good with all parties, and finally emerge from the maze of deceptions, forged documents and impossible fractions not just much richer but entirely legitimate. A friend in finance once told me that many now legitimate hedge funds and financial institutions might have, at one stage, indulged in minor Ponzi-like activities and frauds – before, just at the last minute, making everyone right, squaring off all parties and coming out golden. In the same way, there is a sense that Philbrick was just a few wiggles of an auction paddle away from landing the trick. But for all the impressive, in-air contortions and quadruple twists, a trapeze artist is still screwed if he lands on his head. In the end, there was no great escape. It all went wrong, the alarm was raised, and the search beams blazed across the world.

Philbrick fled to Vanuatu, from where he began talking to Whitfield regularly, though he concealed his location from his old friend. He sent a huge cache of emails and documents to Whitfield with the idea that the two might compose a piece putting forward his side of the story and clearing his name (the documents form a good chunk of Whitfield’s reporting for this book). “The thing is, I really don’t think he thought he was going to get caught,” says Whitfield. “He talked about the FBI and the authorities as if they were another thing, happening to another person. Call it confidence, call it arrogance – whatever. But at a certain point, it’s very difficult to switch that off. It works very well when you’re moving forward, but when you stay still, it can act as a blindfold.” Sharks, I am reliably told, need to keep swimming ever forward or else they die. This is not a problem that concerns smaller fish.

I ask Whitfield what he thinks Philbrick might make of the book. Having received a sentence of seven years in a New York court, he was released earlier this year having served three. His Instagram is infrequently updated with family shots, wry posts, and pictures of ankle tags. What if he walked in here right now, I ask? For a moment Whitfield’s eyes flicker to the door, half-expectantly. “A politician would say, ‘That’s a hypothetical question: I’m not going to answer it’,” he laughs. “But I think the book is by far and away the fairest treatment he is ever likely to have gotten. There were two other books that were out for sale at roughly the time my book went out on submission, written by people who’d never met him. Those books would have been very different beasts. They might have found out a lot of things that Inigo might not want.” He pauses. “If he’s angry about the book, that’s his prerogative, but I don’t think, for me, he has a reason to be. I was extremely careful not to relay anything that was not already in the public domain,” he says. But he admits that “you can’t subject a friendship to the level of scrutiny that I’ve done and expect it to survive. And so that chapter of our friendship has irreparably been closed.”

Whitfield believes Philbrick sent a heckler to derail his book launch. You’re both still young, I say. Might you look back on this in 10 years’ time and laugh? “Look, right now, I can’t imagine it,” Whitfield says. “But also, five years ago, I couldn’t have imagined everything that happened up till today, from 2018 to last year. I didn’t know I was going to have a breakdown. I didn’t know that Inigo was going to go to prison. I didn’t know any of this. So I would be foolish to say it’s an impossibility. But it is not something I’m looking for. I’ve been happier in the years since my friend- ship with Inigo than I was ever during. And that’s not necessarily to say that Inigo is the cause of my sadness or my anxiety, or any of that. It just so happens that I’m in a much better place, and to risk that equilibrium is not something I want to do.”		

Still, Philbrick maintains the ability to surprise and beguile. A 

piece from March of this year depicts him in prison, fielding hundreds of pitches from television executives, publishers and producers, each hungry for a take on his story – the inevitable howl of the scamster industrial complex, of which this piece, in its own aloof way, is probably a tiny part. Whitfield tells me that a few people have asked who he’d want to play him in the seemingly inevitable movie adaptation. (“Ryan Gosling in a fat suit,” he jokes, realising how ridiculous the very premise is. For what it’s worth, with his pensive, kind gaze and strawberry blonde hair, I see Alexander Skarsgård instead.)	

Philbrick, Whitfield hears, has put forth Timothée Chalamet. “I think he thinks the narrative is somehow going to help him,” Whitfield says. The 

piece, which came out a couple of weeks before 

, seems to act as a tantalising accompaniment to the book. At the end of it, Philbrick airily declares that, beyond the movie offers and book deals, what he’d really like is “to get re-established as an art dealer. And that’s going to require a lot of listening and discussing with friends, clients, colleagues. I’ve had some indications of interest from friends in helping me get started, but it’s too early to say more.” Whitfield says he’s heard rumblings about people in the art world who would be happy to work with him again. Philbrick has a restitution debt of $87m hanging over him, which he will now attempt to pay down. And the art market, having no regulatory board or centralised body whatsoever, can do nothing legally to stop him playing in it.

“I thought what I was writing was a portrait of a moribund friendship and two moribund careers,” Whitfield concludes. “But Inigo clearly has other ideas.” There is a certain sense of inevitability to this outrageous mooted comeback, in the way that the wildest plot twists feel, in some odd way, the most obvious. Whitfield notes in his book how Larry Gagosian, in a 1988 interview, was asked what he would change about the market. “That,” he said, “is like asking Dante what he would change about the structure of hell.” The art market does not need Inigo Philbrick, in the way that we do not need art. But perhaps it deserves him.

This feature originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Gentleman's Journal. Read more about it 

Claudine Derksen

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