Last July, I got married. In the year since, I have told the story of how I met my husband perhaps a hundred times. It’s not an especially gripping anecdote—we were both at a pub—but, then again, it doesn’t need to be, because the most ordinary circumstances can take on a certain romantic sheen in light of what came next. As much as I love telling it, I sometimes wonder why this particular kind of origin story is indulged, why it is seen to matter so much more than all the others. Why aren’t we asked to narrate our friendships, even passionate and transformative ones, as we would a marriage?
“All That Glitters,” Orlando Whitfield’s memoir of his fifteen-year friendship with the disgraced art dealer Inigo Philbrick, gives a momentous relationship its due, with unusual directness. It is an art-world story and a scammer story—in November, 2021, Philbrick pleaded guilty to defrauding clients of more than eighty-six million dollars—but it is also a close and careful examination of a life-altering relationship. Throughout the book, as Whitfield strives to convey the absurdity and frivolity of the international art market, and the boundless opportunities for criminality its atmosphere creates, he works just as hard to try to explain why Philbrick’s friendship was so consequential, why it “shaped the way I experience and confront the world.” Some mysteries, it turns out, are easier to parse than others.
Before Philbrick was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison for an art fraud that was said to be the biggest in U.S. history, he was one of the most admired and well-known dealers of his generation. He had galleries in Mayfair and Miami and a life style that could seem glamorous or grim, depending on your appetite for endless dinner parties with the unemployed children of oligarchs. Starting out while still in art school, he got very rich very quickly by taking advantage of the deliberate opacity of the secondary art market, where previously owned works are bought and sold to either individual collectors or groups of investors. Working within the bounds of the legal and the legitimate at the beginning of his career, he moved into murkier spaces as he became more successful. He marketed shares in pieces he didn’t own, faked documents to fraudulently inflate the value of paintings, sold the same shares in multimillion-dollar pieces to multiple investors, and invented elaborate backstories for buyers who turned out not to exist.
When things started to unravel, Philbrick tried to evade his creditors by fleeing to Vanuatu, possibly under the impression that he could not then be extradited to the U.S. (He was wrong; U.S. law enforcement arrested him at a store in the island’s capital.) Whitfield watched much of it happen, both the rise and the fall, initially as an active participant working alongside Philbrick and later as an increasingly startled observer trying to make sense of the person who had been his closest friend. “All That Glitters,” in fact, emerges from an abandoned attempt at collaboration; Whitfield began writing about his friend after Philbrick got in touch from Vanuatu and suggested that they work together on an article he hoped might exonerate him. Things did not go as planned, but the story Whitfield ended up writing is far more interesting, and more truthful, than what Philbrick had in mind.
Whitfield’s account begins with him and Philbrick meeting as art-history undergraduates at Goldsmiths, in London, in 2006. The two didn’t have much in common. Whitfield, nervy and unsure of himself, had enrolled at the university in order to find out what art he liked and why he liked it, to understand how to look at a contemporary work and assess it. (He also admits that he wanted to learn how to argue about art with his father, a former managing director at Christie’s and an expert in antique furniture and Renaissance bronzes.)
Philbrick, in contrast, came from a family with deep roots in the contemporary-art scene—his father a respected curator, his mother an artist, Frank Stella an occasional babysitter. For Whitfield, who was trying to shed the versions of art history mostly passed down from his father—“classical architecture, depictions of drapery in Florentine frescoes and the infuriating dappled light of the Impressionists”—Philbrick’s background was one of the first things that marked him as special. Born in London but raised in the U.S., Philbrick had an accent that reminded Whitfield of Cary Grant’s and a personal style that veered well away from the grubbiness of the average Goldsmiths student in the mid-two-thousands—buttery leather jackets and conscientiously applied Chapstick as opposed to cripplingly tight jeans and spidery roll-up cigarettes. Astoundingly sure of himself even then, he had a habit of challenging professors and fellow-students, often launching into disquisitions on the writings of Arthur Danto or the gender politics of Lee Lozano, “things no one else in the class had ever heard of, let alone had defensible opinions on,” Whitfield writes. Philbrick was not popular—“then again,” Whitfield adds, “I wasn’t either.”
For most of their first year in college, Whitfield studied Philbrick from a distance. The two finally became friends late one night, at a party thrown by Philbrick. To be specific, they became friends when their eyes met over lines of coke laid out on a copy of Edward St. Aubyn’s “Mother’s Milk,” a book they both wanted to talk about for hours. The way Whitfield tells it, the easy intensity of their conversation—“the alacrity of mutual openness”—had less to do with cocaine’s volubility-inducing properties than it did with a flare of mutual recognition. They spent more and more time together, sometimes on drugs and sometimes not, chatting about books and politics and art. Whitfield sees those galloping discussions as his real education, “so challenging, so richly wide-ranging, that I can still trace many of the opinions I hold today back to those long nights.”
In their second year, the pair decided to go into business as art dealers, getting cards printed with their company’s name, “I & O Fine Art.” (A friend suggested that the initials actually stood for Idiot and Oaf.) Despite their shared inexperience—they were both terrified of making phone calls, playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who would be the one to dial—it quickly became evident that Philbrick was freakishly well suited to the job. By temperament, training, and sheer sharky instinct, he saw opportunities to make ludicrous amounts of money where Whitfield mainly saw opportunities to dry-heave with anxiety. They made a few deals together, but Philbrick’s ambitions soon extended beyond what Whitfield felt equipped to keep up with. Later, describing a particularly vertiginous exchange in which “somewhere between $125k and $175k is created out of thin air, a few phone calls and an expensive dinner,” Whitfield outlines two possible responses to making money like that: it can make you feel very clever, or it can make you feel like a fraud. It made Whitfield feel like a fraud.
Deals like that happen all the time, though, and they are not remotely illegal. There is no dedicated regulatory body overseeing the art market, and as Whitfield observes, practices that would be forbidden on a trading floor—acting on inside information, artificially inflating prices, choosing who to sell to—are commonplace. Still, you need a strong stomach. To succeed in the secondary market, Whitfield writes, you must be prescient, manipulative, able to keep your nerve and guard your advantage and make pleasant conversation with people whom you would happily watch drown. You need to be the sort of person who thinks betting on wildly unstable assets of no intrinsic value is fun. Whitfield, by his own admission, possessed none of these qualities. Philbrick possessed them to an extent that suggested he had been built in a lab.
I & O Fine Art folded before it could really take off. Philbrick was also working at Jay Jopling’s White Cube gallery, where he began his ascent. In 2011, with Jopling’s backing, he started running a gallery in Mayfair called Modern Collections. It opened with a show of paintings by Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, two youngish American artists whose work had sold for between thirty thousand and forty thousand dollars a few years before but was now trading for almost a million dollars on the secondary market. Whitfield, who was working as an assistant at a publishing house, thought briefly about being jealous. The pair had graduated from Goldsmiths two years earlier, and Philbrick’s career had already far surpassed his own. But he reasoned that he and Philbrick were simply operating at entirely different speeds. The only thing to do was to stand back and watch his friend go.
One of the most endearing aspects of Whitfield’s narrative is the precision and enthusiasm with which he pinpoints all the traits that drew him to Philbrick and kept drawing him in, even as flickers of his friend’s predatory unscrupulousness began to emerge. Philbrick’s crimes were both opportunistic and calculated, as well as dizzyingly complicated. After his beginnings at Modern Collections, Philbrick delved into corrupt financial machinations, enabled and empowered by the secrecy and instability that are constitutive features of the contemporary-art market. In 2017, he opened a gallery in Miami and seemed to be flying exclusively by private jet, financing his life style by running what the government’s sentencing memorandum called a “Ponzi-like scheme.” Among other things, he sold shares in a Rudolf Stingel painting of Picasso that added up to two hundred and twenty per cent of the work’s value, forged a sales contract at Christie’s, and was accused of withholding fourteen million dollars from clients, in works by Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, Christopher Wool, and Guyton. According to the memorandum, Philbrick kept spreadsheets containing information about his defrauded investors, accompanied by a handwritten note that read “How to fuck them?”
It would be unsurprising (and annoying), then, if Whitfield were to frame his story with the suggestion that he had known there was something seriously wrong with Philbrick all along. This is how it generally seems to go in the emerging memoir genre that might be termed “My Notorious Friend Did Something Bad—What Does That Say About Yours Truly?” In “My Friend Anna,” Rachel DeLoache Williams’s account of her six-month friendship with Anna Delvey, almost forty pages of Delvey failing to pay for things go by before Williams can bring herself to name qualities that she liked in the faux heiress: her “hypnotizing manner” and wispy hair. In the ghostwriter Natalie Beach’s essay about being friends with the influencer Caroline Calloway, Beach claims to have detected something sketchy about Calloway from Day One, when Calloway walked into class at N.Y.U. “not knowing who Lorrie Moore was but claiming she could recite the poems of Catullus in Latin.”
Whitfield, however, has no interest in this kind of self-serving positioning, though he acknowledges the unequal balance of his friendship with Philbrick. He is frank in his admiration for the way Philbrick could tell a story, his “languid, inquisitive and encouraging conversational style that can make you feel like you’re in the best job interview of your career,” the attention he paid to paintings, his understanding of the art market, his sang-froid, his ability to make it seem like all the lights were turning green. The two shared a flat around the time Philbrick started working for Jopling, and, from a window, Whitfield approvingly studied how Philbrick helped his girlfriend into a town car, “as if the whole rigmarole were a dull necessity to be endured.”
He observed, as well, Philbrick’s willingness to let friendships “fizzle and implode under the weight of exasperation and wilful neglect.” Still, Whitfield was startled when it happened to him. Along with a partner, he had started his own small gallery, and was just getting by on the occasional secondary-market deal. On behalf of a client, he sold a Wool painting to Philbrick over dinner, on the strength of a phone photo. It was by far the biggest deal Whitfield had ever made, and he could not afford for it to go wrong. Knowing how tight his friend’s margins were, Philbrick nevertheless stalled on the five-hundred-thousand-dollar payment, proffering low-effort excuses and imperious advice about managing client expectations and ignoring Whitfield’s frantic calls for two weeks. By that point, Philbrick was neck-deep in financial chaos and fraud, and the Wool deal was just one of many he was juggling as he moved money around with increasing strain.