The Brooklyn Rail

In October 2019, the wunderkind art dealer Inigo Philbrick fled New York for Vanuatu. It had come to light that Philbrick had sold a multimillion-dollar painting—a photorealist portrait of Pablo Picasso by Rudolf Stingel (appropriately, an emblem of strutting masculinity)—to three different clients, in portions amounting to 220 percent of the same work. His Ponzi-style ruse turned out to be the tip of an iceberg of fast-and-loose dealing. As Orlando Whitfield recounts in his absorbing account of Philbrick’s rise and fall, the fugitive dealer was tracked down by the FBI in his island hideaway the following summer—his tourist visa having offered him no protection—and later sentenced to seven years in prison. When the judge asked him why he’d done it, his answer was simple: “For money, your honor.”

It is tempting, on the basis of Whitfield’s story, to take the answer at face value. Philbrick was corrupted, slowly or quickly—it isn’t exactly clear when dishonesty shaded into criminality—by the opportunity to spin gigantic sums of cash on the secondary art market. And yet, All That Glitters is more than a mere morality tale. Whitfield, who worked with Philbrick at the latter’s gallery, and then ran his own gallery for a while (he now calls himself a “failed art dealer”), can’t always resist the opportunity to skewer the excess and caprice of the high-end contemporary art market—but what transpires ultimately is something more personal and philosophic. All That Glitters is, in essence, the story of a friendship, and a reflection on the pain of acknowledging what you don’t know—never knew—about a person.

The pair met as students at Goldsmiths College in the mid-2000s, where Philbrick “stood out like a Hollywood smile at a coal miners' strike.” The young man from Connecticut was more suave and knowledgeable by far than his peers. As Whitfield recollects, “in lectures he never took notes, but instead made lengthy disquisitions—about the writings of Joseph Kosuth or Arthur Danto or the gender politics of Lee Lozano.” Their friendship burgeoned on a trip to the Dia Beacon museum in the Hudson Valley, but this was also the moment when Whitfield first perceived Philbrick’s tendency for secrecy. At a jamboree for art-world folk, the aspirant dealer went over to chat to Danto (a figure they both revered), having never mentioned that he knew him.

At Philbrick’s instigation, the friends made a foray into art dealing. Whitfield’s account of their first sale—for which they flew out to Lisbon to exchange a Paula Rego drawing for 15,000 euros in cash—is marvelous as a piece of Tom Wolfe-esque narrative. One feels almost sorry for the Portuguese dealer, who is cast here as a lecherous drunkard. But there were more failures than successes, including an attempt to extract a Banksy mural from a warehouse wall before someone else beat them to it.

While still a student, Philbrick began working for White Cube, the leading London gallery, where he became a protégé of the owner, Jay Jopling. On one occasion, as an intern, he fell off a chair in laughter at a meeting where Jopling was proposing new artists for the gallery; the following day, Jopling offered him a job. By 2011, Philbrick was managing Jopling’s private art collection and running a secondary-market gallery, Modern Collections, under Jopling’s aegis.

The book is a continual reminder—riveting and dismaying by turns—of how youth and some beauty will take you a long way. Philbrick emerges in sharp counterpoint to the book’s author—assured, charismatic, and ruthless where Whitfield (by his own admission) was probably the opposite of all of these things. Philbrick’s arrogance, or what Whitfield terms a “weapons-grade confidence,” reverberates through the reported speech of the story (“It’s all good, playboy,” is a typical piece of repartee)—but then so too does his irreverent humor and easy-going cool. It is possible, even from a remove, to be beguiled momentarily by Philbrick’s swagger; to undergo, as it were, a seduction of the kind wrought by Milton’s Lucifer.

Before long, tensions with Jopling emerged, presaging a rift. As Philbrick struck out on his own, he became symbolic of a trend in the 2010s for “flipping” (buying and then promptly selling) high-value paintings by the likes of Christopher Wool and Wade Guyton. Whitfield offers a pacey summary of Philbrick’s hectic socializing and Byzantine dealmaking. There is a sense, all the while, of his circling around the question of who his friend was. “He had vanished into his bank balance,” he writes, in wry summation of Philbrick’s attainment of a super-rich lifestyle.

Much of the book is a work of reconstruction—the story of goings-on that Whitfield never perceived at the time (repeatedly, he excoriates himself for not having guessed). Philbrick himself provided extensive documentation, and spoke lengthily to Whitfield over the phone from Vanuatu. Yet Whitfield seems determined neither to take Philbrick’s part nor to vilify, and his lack of moralizing is one of the book’s greatest strengths. At times, Philbrick’s ruses seem more comedic than sinister—such as the occasion when (as the manager of a billionaire’s art holdings) he siphoned off funds to pay for a sculpture by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, then failed actually to buy the piece. When the billionaire sent someone to make an inventory of the art, including the non-existent Gonzalez-Torres, Philbrick simply bought a set of rubber mats—which the sculpture would have consisted of—and presented them as the bona fide work. “Inigo was unintentionally questioning notions of authenticity, authorship and value—even the very nature of art itself,” Whitfield drily posits.

In the opening pages, Whitfield refers to a nervous breakdown at the tail-end of his own career in the art world. The droll honesty with which he writes seems to be a kind of catharsis. In the second half of the book, he gives an intermittent account of a new career in paper conservation. This substory, which operates as rather too obvious a foil for the venality of art dealing, is less compelling by far than the main narrative. Perhaps this is inevitable: Whitfield had consciously traded in an exhilarating, destructive existence for one of judicious care.

Whitfield’s desire, one senses increasingly, is to stand back from events without prejudice—to distill the past with the level-headedness of a reporter, rather than to settle scores. The result is a twisting, humorous, and sometimes painful story. The seeming absence of an agenda in writing the book, beyond a desire to make sense of his and Philbrick’s intertwining lives—to capture the nature of a pivotal friendship, to ponder how that friend strayed beyond his or anyone’s understanding—affords the story a redeeming authenticity.