£52bn annual sales for the Art World!

Art World’s estimated total annual sales of over £52billion ( $65  billion) like, Venice’s rich displays art, old, new, and compete with parties in private palazzi and billionaires’ boats.

Yet art traders are struggling to convert the next generation of enthusiasts into committed buyers. Prices, ownership, and conditions that reveal the limits of a market with no overarching oversight, which still relay on handshakes, and the hidden code of conduct. In the last year art advisor Lisa Schiff whose clients include Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, stands accused of running a Ponzi scheme amid a legal claim that she owes other collectors nearly $7m, art lead Guy Wildenstein has been found guilty of tax fraud, sentenced to four years in prison and fined €1m, and British artist Damien Hirst has been revealed to have backdated some of his recent works to his 1990s heyday. 

Inigo Philbrick, an art dealer who flew too close to Sun absconding to the Pacific island of Vanuatu to hide from mounting legal claims before his FBI arrest in 2020. Philbrick pleaded guilty to $86m wire fraud scheme that took in collectors, investors, and fellow traders, and was handed a seven years prison sentence. Orlando Whitfield in his “All That Glitters”, records his memories of 15 years of their imbalanced relationship from meeting in their twenties at London’s Goldsmith’s arts College in 2006 through to intermittent conversations during Philbrick’s incarceration.  What the mismatched pair share, poignancy are divorced parents and successful art-world fathers whom they were wired to impress. Philbrick’s was a museum director, Whitfield’s was an auctioneer. Whitfield admits that he came to doubt many of Philbrick’s stories, including one in which the instinctive dealer buys a watch at one end of London’s Burlington Arcade, then immediately resells it at the other end, making £500 in less than 60 seconds. Art market had the potential for scams. Some of today’s buyers are more speculators than art lovers, and don’t even see the works in which they park their millions.  Philbrick sold another Stingel – one of his gold paintings in “hushed AmEx tones” to a client upon them, for $2.5m, on to a joint venture that he himself ran with one of his early mentors, the esteemed White Cube Gallery founder Jay Joping. Philbrick had originally bought the work for $300, 000 because, as he knew, it was damaged to the extent that the artist wanted it destroyed. No one else knew the score and unable to persuade his usual conservator to restore it, Philbrick found three people to execute a good touch-up in garage in London’s Mayfair. The work then got a clean bill of health as “now a Philbrick Stingel”. It is still in circulation. He said “ I don’t think failure ever even occurred to Inigo”, in a seemingly unchecked arena, his actions included creating a fake client and managing to sell 220 per cent of one artwork, a 2012, painting based on a photograph of Pablo Picasso by the briefly in demand Italian conceptual artist Rudolf Stengel. 

Philbrick left prison on two years of supervised release, as he marked his freedom on Instagram, in a shared post with his girlfriend Victoria Baker-Harber, star of reality TV show Made In Chelsea, the pair were snapped on a picnic blanket with their toddler.  The happily family portrait appeared in Vanity Fair that elaborates Philbrick’s shame-free version of events. He says, a novice rogue in an unregulated market if willing participants. “By no means am I blameless, but the people I was partnered with were all seeking an edge”.  Philbrick’s high-stakes deals were fostered within the art market’s increasingly financialised environment, with its promise of great returns despite flimsy data. During the pandemic, when in-person art events were all but cancelled, such promised morphed into a craze for digital, cyrptocurrely-based, non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art by Orlando Whitfield, Profile £17.99,/Knopf $29, 336 pages.