It’s entertaining, to put it mildly, 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 an art dealer called 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.
That was one of Philbrick’s trademark frauds, but far from the only one. He had an incredibly short career yet managed to hoodwink some of the richest people on the planet into trusting him with vast sums of money, apparently without doing even token checks on his background, methods or finances.
