Last July I got married. In the year since then, I've probably told the story of how I met my husband a hundred times. It's not a particularly moving anecdote—we were both at a pub—but it doesn't have to be, because even the most ordinary of circumstances can take on a certain romantic sheen when you think about what happened after. I love telling this story, but I sometimes wonder why this particular kind of origin story is embraced and given so much more weight than all the others. Why aren't we asked to tell even passionate, transformative friendships the way we tell marriages?
All That Glitters, Orlando Whitfield's memoir of his 15-year friendship with the notorious art dealer Inigo Philbrick, does justice to this important relationship with unusual candor. It is both an art world story and a con man's story (in November 2021, Philbrick pleaded guilty to defrauding clients of more than $86 million), but also a thorough and careful examination of a life-changing relationship. Throughout the book, Whitfield strives to convey the absurdity and frivolity of the international art market and the endless opportunities for crime that atmosphere creates, while at the same time trying to explain why his friendship with Philbrick was so important, why it “shaped the way I experienced and confronted the world.” Some mysteries, it turns out, are easier to decipher than others.
Before he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison for what was said to be the largest art fraud in U.S. history, Philbrick was one of the most respected and well-known dealers of his generation. He had galleries in Mayfair and Miami and a lifestyle that could be seen as glamorous or gloomy, depending on his appetite for endless dinner parties with the unemployed children of oligarchs. He began his career while still in art school and quickly became very rich by exploiting the deliberate opacity of the secondhand art market, where previously owned works are bought and sold to private collectors or groups of investors. Early in his career, he operated within the bounds of law and fiat, but as he became more successful, he moved into more opaque areas. He sold shares in works he did not own, forged documents to fraudulently inflate the values of paintings, sold the same shares in works worth millions of dollars to multiple investors, and concocted elaborate backstories for buyers who turned out to not exist.
As the situation began to unfold, Philbrick tried to flee to Vanuatu to escape his creditors, presumably because he thought he wouldn't be extradited to the U.S. (He was wrong, and U.S. law enforcement arrested him at a store in the island's capital). Whitfield watched many of the ups and downs, first as an active participant working with Philbrick, and later as an astonished observer trying to understand the man who had been his closest friend. In fact, “All That Glitters” grew out of an aborted attempt at collaboration. Whitfield began writing about his friend when Philbrick contacted him from Vanuatu, suggesting that they work together to write an article that would exonerate him. It didn't go as planned, but the article Whitfield ended up writing was far more interesting and true than Philbrick had in mind.
Whitfield's account begins when he met Philbrick in 2006 as an undergraduate art history student at Goldsmiths College in London. The two men didn't have much in common; Whitfield, nervous and unsure of himself, went to college to find out what art he liked and why, and to understand how to see and appreciate contemporary art. (He also admits that he wanted to learn how to discuss art with his father, a former managing director of Christie's and an expert on antique furniture and Renaissance bronzes.)
In contrast, Philbrick grew up in a family deeply involved in the contemporary art world: his father was a respected curator, his mother an artist, and Frank Stella was his occasional babysitter. Philbrick's background was one of the first things that made him seem special to Whitfield, who was trying to move away from an interpretation of art history that he inherited mainly from his father: “Classical architecture, the depictions of clothing in Florentine frescoes, and the irritating dappled light of Impressionism.” Born in London but raised in the United States, Philbrick gave Whitfield an accent that reminded him of Cary Grant, and a personal style that was far removed from the scruffiness of your average Goldsmiths student in the mid-2000s. He favored buttery leather jackets and carefully applied lip balm over tight jeans and spidery cigarettes. Remarkably self-confident even then, Philbrick had a habit of arguing with his professors and classmates, often launching into debates on the writings of Arthur Danto or the gender politics of Lee Lozano. “No one in the class had ever been heard of, much less had a reasonable opinion of it,” Whitfield wrote. Philbrick was not popular, “but then again, neither was I,” Whitfield added.
For most of their freshman year, Whitfield observed Philbrick from afar. The two finally became friends at a late-night party hosted by Philbrick, specifically when their eyes met over a line of cocaine in Edward St. Aubyn's Mother's Milk, a book the two could talk about for hours. According to Whitfield, the easy heat of their conversations, “the quickness with which we were open to one another,” was due more to a spark of mutual appreciation than to the chatter-inducing qualities of cocaine. The two spent more time together, sometimes over drugs, sometimes not, talking about books, politics, and art. Whitfield sees these whirlwind discussions as the real learning, “so challenging and so varied that many of the opinions I still hold can be traced back to that long night.”
In their second year together, the two decided to go into business as art dealers, printing their business name “I & O Fine Art” on their business cards (a friend told me the initials actually stood for Idiot and Oaf). Though both men were terrified of the phone and inexperienced enough to decide who would make the call by rock-paper-scissors, it soon became clear that Philbrick was unusually suited to the job. With temperament, training, and pure shark instinct, he saw an opportunity to make extraordinary amounts of money, while Whitfield only saw an opportunity to make anxiety and nausea. The two made a few deals together, but Philbrick's ambition was soon outgrowing Whitfield's. Later, Whitfield describes one particularly dizzying exchange in which “$125,000 to $175,000 was generated on no basis whatsoever, over a few phone calls and expensive dinners,” and outlines two reactions to making money that way. It either makes you feel super smart, or it makes you feel like a fraud, which Whitfield felt like a fraud.
But such transactions are common and far from illegal. There is no dedicated regulatory body overseeing the art market, and, as Whitfield points out, it's common to see people acting on inside information, artificially inflating prices, and being selective about who they sell to — things that are prohibited on the exchange. Still, it takes determination. To succeed in the secondary market, Whitfield writes, you have to be visionary, manipulative, calm, able to protect your edge, and able to hold pleasant conversations with people who are happy to watch you drown. You have to be the kind of person who enjoys gambling on a highly volatile, intrinsically worthless asset. By his own admission, Whitfield had none of these qualities. Philbrick had them to the point that you would think they were made in a lab.
I & O Fine Art was crushed before it could really take off. Philbrick also worked at Jay Jopling's White Cube gallery, where he started his career. In 2011, with Jopling's support, he started running a gallery called Modern Collection in Mayfair. The opening was an exhibition of paintings by two young American artists, Wade Guyton and Kelly Walker. Their works, which a few years ago would have sold for $30,000 to $40,000, are now trading for nearly $1 million on the secondary market. Whitfield, who worked as an assistant at a publishing house, was tempted to get jealous for a moment. The two had graduated from Goldsmiths two years earlier, and Philbrick's career was already far ahead of his. But he thought that he and Philbrick were just moving at completely different speeds. All he could do was stand back and watch his friend walk away.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Whitfield's story is how accurately and enthusiastically he pinpoints all the traits that attracted and continued to attract Philbrick to his friend, even as his friend's predatory unscrupulousness began to emerge. Philbrick's crimes were opportunistic, calculating, and dizzyingly complex. After he began working at Modern Collections, Philbrick became embroiled in corrupt financial machinations enabled and empowered by the secrecy and volatility that are constitutive features of the contemporary art market. In 2017, he opened a gallery in Miami and earned a living by running what the government's sentencing memorandum called a “Ponzi-like scheme,” with all his flying appearing to be by private jet. Among other things, Philbrick was accused of selling Rudolph Stingel's shares in Picasso paintings for 220 percent of the works' value, falsifying purchase and sale agreements at Christie's and concealing $14 million from clients in works by Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, Christopher Wool and Guyton. According to the memorandum, Philbrick compiled information about defrauded investors into spreadsheets, complete with handwritten notes that read, “How ya doin'?”
It's not surprising (and annoying), then, that Whitfield frames her story with the suggestion that she knew all along that something was seriously wrong with Philbrick. This seems to be common in the emerging genre of memoirs that could be called “My Notorious Friend Did Something Wrong—What Does It Say About Me?”. In Rachel DeLoach Williams's account of her six-month friendship with Anna Delvey, My Friend Anna, nearly 40 pages into Delvey's failure to pay her bills before Williams can name the fake heir's favorite traits: her “hypnotizing manner” and thin hair. In ghostwriter Natalie Beach's essay about her friendship with the influential Caroline Callaway, Beach claims that she sensed something fishy about Callaway from the first day she walked into her New York University class “not knowing who Lorrie Moore was, claiming to be able to recite the poems of Catullus in Latin.”
But while Whitfield acknowledges that his friendship with Philbrick is uneven, he's not interested in this self-serving position. He freely praises Philbrick's storytelling, his “easygoing, inquisitive, encouraging style of conversation that made you feel like you were having the best job interview of your career,” his obsession with painting, his understanding of the art market, his calm, his ability to make every light turn green. When Philbrick started working for Jopling, the two shared a flat, and Whitfield watched with satisfaction from the window as Philbrick loaded his girlfriend into a town car, “as if the whole tedious process was some tedious necessity that had to be endured.”
Whitfield also found Philbrick “willing to allow friendships to dissipate and crumble under the weight of annoyance and willful neglect.” Yet, when it happened to him, he was surprised. He had started his own small gallery with a partner and was trying to get by by dealing occasionally on the second-hand market. On behalf of a client, he sold a Wool painting to Philbrick over dinner, relying on a cell phone photo. It was by far the largest deal Whitfield had ever made and he could not afford to fail. Knowing how tight his friend's interests were, Philbrick still held up the $500,000 payment, giving effortless excuses and heavy-handed advice to meet his client's expectations and ignore Whitfield's frantic phone calls for two weeks. At that point, Philbrick was immersed in financial turmoil and fraud, and the Wool deal was just one of many he was juggling as he moved money around under increasing stress.
