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Arts Intel Report

The Great Art Fraud

Inigo Philbrick

It’s entertaining to watch a two-hour documentary that manages to confirm every comment ever made about the ludicrous hype, dodgy deals and murky swindles of the contemporary art market—and then to show that the reality is even more shamelessly corrupt than we outsiders imagined. Such a documentary is The Great Art Fraud, which traces the meteoric rise and fall of art dealer Inigo Philbrick, a 21st-century rake whose “progress” you can imagine being painted by a modern-day Hogarth. Except that a modern-day Hogarth would probably be too busy suing Philbrick for selling one of his paintings to several collectors simultaneously, each of them unaware of the others. The two-part series traces Philbrick’s start in the art world, his orchestrating of what the F.B.I. has called “the largest art-based fraud in U.S. history,” and his arrest, in 2019. —Richard Morrison

Photo: Guerin Blask/The “Sunday Times” Magazine/News Licensing