Inigo Philbrick — behold the latest “wunderkind” to game the system...and pay the price
Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, Lisa Schiff, Inigo Philbrick. A pattern is beginning to emerge…
Over the past three or four years, one entrepreneurial “wunderkind” after another has been revealed not as the business geniuses many assumed them to be, but as shameless grifters bent on attaining for themselves the kind of luxury lifestyle enjoyed by their super-rich clients.
Blood therapy diagnostics, cryptocurrency exchanges, money-laundering, art market double-dealing, Ponzi schemes — the sheer chutzpah behind these dark materials is becoming wearily familiar.
But it’s the art market fraudster Inigo Philbrick, recently released from a federal prison in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that is garnering the most attention.
This is because he is the subject of an excellent new book by his erstwhile business associate Orlando Whitfield — All That Glitters — that lays out in forensic detail Philbrick’s corrupt art market schemes.
The media loves art world criminals — the grifters, thieves, fakers and forgers — and it seems the law does too. How else to explain the excessively lenient sentences handed down to such people by the judicial system?
For her part in the Theranos blood scandal, Elizabeth Holmes was handed 11 1/4 years; Sam Bankman-Fried was given 25 years for his multi-billion dollar cryptocurrency scam. Lisa Schiff is still waiting to see how her alleged art Ponzi scheme will be adjudged, while Inigo Philbrick, found guilty of one of the most extensive art frauds in American history, was sentenced to seven years, but served only four. He is also required to pay $86.7 million dollars in reparations. Don’t be surprised to see him take up where he left off, re-emerging in another art market operation, if only to pay off his mountainous debts. Netflix awaits, methinks.
Wunderkind as guru
I first encountered Philbrick at one of the London instalments of the Art Business Conference. He’d been invited to join a panel to discuss auction guarantees. Even now, some years later, I can recall wondering why on earth this shifty dude had been invited to dispense pearls of wisdom to an experienced industry crowd. Clearly people were taken in by his soigné charm and apparent inside knowledge of the byzantine complexities of the guarantee system. I was not.
It now seems, based on Orlando Whitfield’s book, that Philbrick’s appearance at that conference must have been around the same time that he was forging documents in support of a fictional guarantee on a Rudolf Stingel painting about to appear at auction. He’d sold fractional investments in the painting to a number of parties, most of whom were unaware of the existence of their co-investors or even the whereabouts of the painting.
I won’t drill down into the details of Philbrick’s manifold crimes as Whitfield provides a suitably colourful and comprehensive picture of his trajectory from zero to hero and back again. Some of us have been around the art market long enough to be aware that suave shysters like Philbrick walk among us. Until, that is, they’re arrested in their Bermuda shorts on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu (below).
One notable subtext to Whitfield’s book is that Orlando and Inigo (such posh names open doors in the art market) both had what you might call “daddy issues.”
Philbrick’s father, Harry, is a minor American museum director; Whitfield’s late father, Paul, was a former managing director of Christie’s. Such connections are gold dust in an art market bewitched by status. One had the clear sense that the two young men were driven by a desire to impress their fathers, even if it meant occasionally bending the rules, or, in Philbrick’s case, breaking the law. Who said the art market was unregulated?
Whitfield is a naturally gifted writer and his book is a delight to read (he has worked in the past as an editor for a publishing house). It is also at times infuriating for its conflicted sycophancy, but this merely reflects contemporary culture, bewitched as it is by any example of youthful entrepreneurialism.
After a time, the plaudits begin to grate. Philbrick, we learn, is “the kind of guy who moves markets.” (Shouldn’t he be moving wardrobes in a provincial auction rooms?)
Elsewhere we’re told: “Inigo, everyone agreed, was the real deal.” The word “real” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Whitfield’s brutal honesty occasionally veers toward self-flagellation, but it’s clear that he was fatally in thrall to his glamorous mentor — “…like everyone else around him, I saw what I wanted to see: a wunderkind, a shooting star, an artist of the deal.” A bonsai Trump, in other words.
Clearly a lot of contemporary art market professionals were bewitched by the young arriviste with the charm, the money, the celebrity girlfriend, the network, the connections. I keep my bullshit detector in good working order and when I saw him at the Art Business Conference I smelled a rat. It thus came as no surprise to hear of his arrest and inevitable descent. The visual metaphors come thick and fast — Hans Gruber plummeting from the top of the Nakatomi Plaza building? That’ll do.
For some inexplicable reason, The Art Newspaper elected to stick a photo of a besuited Philbrick on this month’s art market page (above). His quote, from a Vanity Fair profile, informs us: “I was also struck by how few of the people I’ve interacted with since entering the Bureau of Prisons have even a conception of what an art dealer does.”
What? He is omitting to mention that his own crimes had little to do with art. They were closer to those for which his fellow Allentown prison inmate Martin Shkreli is serving time — securities fraud.
It’s no surprise that ignorance of the art trade extends to the prison system. Very few people outside the art world understand how the art market works or how art dealers operate. But you can be sure that most don’t operate like Philbrick, or the prisons would be stuffed with art dealers.
The complexity of the crimes Philbrick committed reflect the dismal financialisation and wilful obscurantism that has come to characterise the 21st century blue-chip art market.
I’ve steered clear of these kind of people in my career, preferring to observe from a safe distance. As Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, has noted: “You see clearest when you see from the periphery.”
And he doesn’t mean Vanuatu.
I am pleased to learn that Whitfield is a far better wordsmith than Philbrick is an art dealer. As you state, the veneer of glamour and sophistication lures people into this world for all the wrong reasons. Not much changes through the ages but an arch practitioner like Duveen operated many light years beyond the rather grubby dealings of Philbrick.