All that Glitters: A story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art Author : Orlando Whitfield ISBN-13 : 978-1788169950 Publisher : Profile Guideline Price : £20 You don’t have to be rich to be awful, and you don’t have to be awful to be rich, but a compelling fascination ensues when the two coincide. Add contemporary art for a truly heady cocktail. At the coal face of rich awfulness for more than a decade, Orlando Whitfield worked as a London art dealer and gallerist; for some of that time with erstwhile friend, Inigo Philbrick.
“Our names are ridiculously impractical,” Philbrick admits at one point in the narrative, but in this tale of greed, excess and lies so slippery you feel as if you’re skating on the surface of a weirdly mirrored reality, the extravagant names are just the tip of an almost unbelievable iceberg. [ Why has Damien Hirst been burning thousands of his paintings? ] [ Passion investments soar as art and handbags see record prices ] In brief, Philbrick, who was released from a US prison into house arrest in January of this year, pleaded guilty to multimillion-dollar art fraud in 2021. Quite simply he sold shares in the same art works to too many people, and also sold works he didn’t own.
How can such a thing happen? Surely if you buy a work of art, you own it and hang it in your home. Not in this part of the art world: art is collateral, an asset class, a way of moving money around, something to flip for profit. It is telling that early in the book, Whi.
