Orlando Whitfield on “All That Glitters” and revisiting Inigo Philbrick

Titles can be deceptive, but the title and subtitle of Orlando Whitfield’s debut, All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art, let you know precisely what you’ll be getting into. In his book, Whitfield tells the story of his own involvement with the art world — both on his own and through his friendship with Inigo Philbrick, the art dealer who was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2022 for defrauding clients out of millions of dollars.

Whitfield’s book is often thrilling, including a sequence late in the book when he details how an auction and its aftermath helped reveal the deceit in Philbrick’s operations. But he goes further than that, with the narrative encompassing everything from the initial elation that he himself felt when operating a gallery and the growing disillusionment he felt with the industry over time.

Philbrick plays a significant role in this book, but his fraught connection to Whitfield is only a fraction of what readers will find in All That Glitters. There’s plenty dealing with both friendship and familial relationships here; there’s also an absolutely fascinating section detailing the ins and outs of paper conservation. (And if you’re wondering how paper conservation can be a fascinating subject: read All That Glitters.)

InsideHook spoke with Whitfield about the history of his memoir, writing about the art world from a distance and the influence of the late Martin Amis on the project.

InsideHook: There was something that you wrote in All That Glitters that led me to rethink a lot of my assumptions about the art world — which is to say your observation that there are art worlds rather than one art world. As someone who is well-versed in that world, was that ever something that you had to reckon with yourself?

Not necessarily. Right from the get-go, I knew something of the art world that my father worked in, which was quite clubbable. I don’t know what the equivalent in New York would be. Possibly the Yale Club. It was old school, whereas the contemporary art world that I came to know when I started working in it was completely alien to the world that my father had worked in. So really very early on, I realized that there were great disparities between them. Maybe not different worlds, but different spheres, certainly.

For all that your friendship with Inigo Philbrick is a significant part of your book, it’s far from the only subject that you cover there. My favorite aspect of the book was when you discussed the art of paper conservation, because that’s something I had known literally nothing about beforehand. How did the full scope of the book come into place? Did you know from the outset that you always wanted it to be a book that touched on these very disparate things?

I actually wrote the chapter about my time in paper conservation and Piers [Townshend] first. After I’d sold the book, that was the first chapter I wrote. The proposal that sold the book was the best part of 35,000 words. So I’d already written quite a lot of material about doing early deals with Inigo and about parts of his downfall.

I didn’t want this to be a book about Inigo. I wanted it to be a book about the friendship that I have with him. Because actually, I don’t think Inigo is terribly interesting. I think he’s this kind of cipher. As someone who is emblematic of everything which is wrong with the art world, he’s quite interesting. But other than that, I actually don’t think he’s a particularly fascinating figure. I mean, obviously I was fascinated by him, but, but I was under something of a spell and it’s quite, quite difficult to do that. It’s something that takes years to affect someone.

I loved writing about Piers. Piers is still a good close friend; I see him most weeks.

One of the running themes of the book is you approaching your friendship with Inigo from different angles and trying to figure out what was actually going on after the fact. What was that process like for you as a writer? Did you have to go back and reevaluate where you were at certain points in your history?

Very much. I think it took the writing of this book to make me realize how strange and, in certain parts, how flawed that friendship was. I mean, I wouldn’t replace it, but I also think I would be very wary about entering into a friendship with someone quite so instantly beguiling. I think I would, in the future, have my suspicions.

It wasn’t really a book which I set out to be a memoir in the way that it became. And the first draft was much less memoir-y than the second. And then the third was the one that really became the book that you’ve now read. I had amazing editors and an incredible agent who helped me see the book that I needed to write rather than the book that I initially envisioned. As you’ll note from the book, I briefly worked in publishing myself. And so I was very fortunate to be in a position where I trusted the editorial process right from the get-go. I think the book is certainly the better for that.

As someone who’s had a foot in each world, do you feel like the book world and the art world are very far apart or do you see there being a lot of overlap between them?

When I started my own gallery with a friend, part of that was from, as I write in the book, a desire to work with artists. I think that desire came about from the time that I spent working in the editorial department of a publishing company. Whether the work of art will be a book or a painting or a sculpture, whatever it may be, these are all works of art, but you’re helping them come into the world. It’s an act of cultural midwifery. I think that there are similarities in that.

Obviously there isn’t a secondary market for books unless you’re talking about book dealers. I do think that primary market galleries and the way that editors and gallerists work with artists and writers is fairly analogous.

Before reading All That Glitters, I was much less aware of some of the art world practices that you describe in the book, such as people selling off shares in works of art that they own. Was it challenging to find the right balance between your knowledge of that world and writing for an audience that might not be as aware of certain practices?

Absolutely. My U.K. editor’s father writes books about artists, and he’s an extremely good art writer. And oddly enough, my U.S. editor’s daughter works for Gagosian, and she edited all of the books by John Richardson about Picasso — extraordinary books. There was a degree to which we all had to check ourselves because I think we were all quite art world literate. There was definitely a conscious effort to make this something that anyone could walk in. I didn’t want this to be a book that would only appeal to art world readers because at the end of the day, they know the story, they know how this works.

I had a message from someone quite prominent in the auction business just yesterday over Instagram, someone I’d never met before. He just dropped me a line to say that they’d liked the book. I’ve heard that from people at the head of auction houses and at the bottom rung of galleries. And so I hope that this will be a book that will continue to demystify that world a little bit.

In much of All That Glitters, the focus is on the world of galleries in London. As you follow Inigo’s career, that then takes the narrative to Miami and the Miami art world. You also address some of the cultural differences between the U.S. and the U.K. Was that another aspect of the book that you refined over time?

The contemporary art world is almost the definition of the “global village.” It’s the same people who see each other in different places all over the world. I think that, weirdly enough, for many of the people I wrote about in the book, it doesn’t matter whether they’re in New York or whether they’re in London. They’re actually the same people. They live these almost anesthetized hotel room existences. But that is part and parcel of the ease of being extremely well-placed, that wherever you go in the world, you can have more or less the same experience. It’s a great tragedy of the uber-rich, not that I feel necessarily particularly sorry for them.

There was one detail that stood out for me when you mentioned that galleries had become concentrated in a certain London neighborhood largely because the people who were frequenting those galleries wanted everything in one spot.

It’s something I think about quite a lot. Ben, my former business partner, the person I started the gallery with after Inigo, he and I had a gallery, which I mentioned in the book, in an area called Clerkenwell. Both of us having grown up in London, we both thought it was incredibly central. We couldn’t believe our luck, but actually we couldn’t ever get anyone to come to it because that wasn’t where people stayed.

The auction houses are all within a cherry stone spitting distance of each other. Phillips, Bonhams, Sotheby’s and Christie’s are literally all within a mile radius of each other. They also happen to be within a mile radius of the Connaught and the Ritz and all of these things. That added to the way that art fairs have changed the art market, which is basically that you get these cookie cutter art tents, which pop up around the world in cities like Miami and Hong Kong and New York and London and Paris. And it’s just the same dealers selling the same art in different cities.

The art market has become vehemently or drastically restricted by the way that the art fairs have changed the market. These very, very wealthy people have lost any of the sense of adventure that the early boom in contemporary art really has. That sense of Damien Hirst driving people in a Mini from central London down to Docklands to see the show that he put on called Freeze.

I’ve spoken to really early contemporary art collectors in the 1990s, and all of them talk about this thrill of adventure, of ending up in some warehouse party in deepest East London. Of course, we now realize that that warehouse, you know, is almost certainly a Le Labo. And that everyone who was making art there now is either broke because their market got screwed or they are so wealthy that they’re having architects design houses for them around the corner.

The art fair model basically says you can get it at a one-stop shop. If you look at an art fair model like Frieze, it started off as a cutting-edge contemporary fair, and then they started to allow a bit of modern stuff in, and then they launched Frieze Masters. And suddenly, basically, you can go to an art fair in London or New York, and you can buy anything from something that came out of a studio in East London 10 minutes ago, to something that was painted on a fucking church wall 10,000 years ago. And it’s all under one roof. And so we wonder why there’s a sort of contraction in the art market. I think it’s because people are getting bored.

Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.

Rants are good. One of the other things that you bring up in the book is your own relationship to the art world and how you extricated yourself from running a gallery and its effect on your mental health. What does your relationship to art look like nowadays?

My partner is very involved in art, and is a wonderful printmaker. So she and I see a lot of shows together. I don’t have a particularly close relationship with the art market, or what one would call the art world, anymore. I obviously have friends who still work in it. I have friends who are artists, who are dealers and who are art writers. I still go to gallery shows, although with much more suspicion than I suspect I used to go to them with.

Working with Piers really redressed what had become a very commercial attitude towards art. Very early on in the book, I talk about the fact that I couldn’t really see anything but the numbers. And it’s a wonderful thing now that I don’t have to think about how much something’s worth. I just think about what it makes me feel.

One of the two epigraphs of the book comes from Martin Amis’s London Fields. And there are points in your memoir where you point out that real life was starting to feel, at times, like a Martin Amis novel. When did that first occur to you? And were there any other authors who you saw as guiding lights for this project?

Martin Amis is a guiding light for pretty much everything I’ve ever thought since I started reading him. I was actually listening to some essays of his at the gym earlier. Inigo was such an Amisian character. He’s really, in some ways, a kind of updated, metrosexual John Self. What was that extraordinary line of Amis’s? “A gurgling wizard of calorific excess.” I mean, he’s not that, but he is. He is that transatlantic cipher of money and greed. He became a total caricature, I’m sad to say, but maybe that was intentional. I don’t know.

I think I realized that that was a thing when I read a piece, probably about a year before Amis died. I read that Amis lived in some brownstone in Brooklyn that burnt down. He moved into a place in Dumbo, which in the interview, it mentions that it overlooked the jail that Inigo was in, the MDC. That was the moment that it clicked.

Also — I think it is also in the book — what I gave Inigo every year for his birthday was a first edition Martin Amis. We shared a love of him. You know, we shared a love of a lot of things.

One detail that I found really heartbreaking was that Inigo left London just after the birth of his child. Something that, for a lot of people, is a very big, formative, positive experience. And it seemed to be something that he was steadily moving away from towards the end of his career.

Yeah, well, if you ask Inigo, he’s just at the beginning of his second career. So we shall see how that all works out.