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.
In 2006 the 19-year-old Philbrick joined the all-powerful Jay Jopling’s White Cube gallery in London as an intern. It was 13 years later, in 2019, when the mega-rich collectors he had defrauded began to put two and two together and make $86 million (the jaw-dropping total of his thefts). That was when he did a runner to the Pacific island of Vanuatu with his fiancée, a glamorous socialite and sometime Made in Chelsea star called Victoria Baker-Harber.
The FBI, having sifted through thousands of documents to uncover Philbrick’s tangled web of deception, tracked him down there the following year and put him on trial in New York. His lawyer tried to plead that Philbrick was somehow the victim of a broken home, but that assertion was virtually laughed out of court. Pointing out the vast scale of Philbrick’s fraud, the judge asked incredulously: “And you’re saying that’s because his parents got divorced?”
He was sentenced to seven years in prison but released last year after four. Now, it seems, he expects to get back into dealing art, though he’s going to need some incredible deals, you would think, if he’s going to fulfill the court order to pay back the $86 million to his victims.
How did Philbrick manage to pull off what the FBI has called “the largest art-based fraud in US history”? The documentary, which gives him ample opportunities to speak for himself, picks up his story when, still a teenager but determined to get out of Connecticut (where his father was a respected museum director), he came to London and wangled his internship at what he calls “the sexiest if not biggest gallery in the world”. That was White Cube, run by Jopling, whom Philbrick describes as “lord and master in the world of contemporary art”.
There was one problem. As an American, Philbrick needed a visa to remain in the UK. So he applied to Goldsmiths in London, alma mater to Damien Hirst and such like, and got in. Interviewed in the program the Goldsmiths professor Andrew Renton denies giving Philbrick a place simply because Renton had also taught his father years before (“Nepotism doesn’t work like that at Goldsmiths”) but rather because he found Philbrick “disarmingly charming”.
That disarming charm was also quickly directed at Jopling, who doesn’t appear in the documentary and is now one of those demanding money back from Philbrick. “Jay and I really hit it off,” Philbrick says. “He was definitely a surrogate father figure and I was an adopted son figure.”
So persuasive was Philbrick that Jopling, who employed 150 people, quickly entrusted him with bigger and bigger clients: eastern European oligarchs, for instance, keen to make what they were assured were “can’t fail” investments in contemporary art, who needed someone they felt they could trust to guide them towards the right purchases.
Then, at just 22, Jopling gave Philbrick his own Mayfair gallery, Modern Collections. According to Philbrick, Jopling wanted to create a business “that could make money for him while he slept”. Whether that’s true or not, there’s no doubt that Philbrick was himself making extraordinary money for his age and experience. His earnings quickly shot up, he says, “from a bus fare to £500,000 [$650,000] a year”.
That wasn’t enough. After a couple of years, apparently with Jopling’s blessing and financial guarantees, the name of the Mayfair gallery was changed from Modern Collections to the Inigo Philbrick Gallery. But to fund a jet-set lifestyle that by this point had graduated from the lavish and hedonistic (with, he admits, plenty of drugs and prostitutes to help the parties swing) to off-the-scale excess, Philbrick started to do things that, even by the loose standards of the opaque and unregulated art market, he knew were illegal. And then he moved his operation to Miami, where mega-wealthy fools and their money are apparently even more easily parted by a “disarmingly charming” conman than in London or New York.
He would offer gullible billionaires shares in the same artwork — Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Humidity (1982), for example — that totaled far more than 100 per cent of its value, relying on them never meeting and comparing notes. Then he would use that co-owned work as collateral (without the permission of the other owners) to buy another work.
One such work was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Humidity (1982), said to be a portrait of Andy Warhol (the figure on the left appears to be wearing the artist’s famous “fright wig”) and the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, which became the subject of a years-long, multimillion pound legal battle.
One fund manager, interviewed in the documentary, lent him $2.1 million against a payout on an auction sale Philbrick had supposedly negotiated, and never saw the money again. When he spotted Philbrick a few weeks later at Sotheby’s in New York, Philbrick sprinted out of the salesroom and across the street to avoid being confronted. “That was the last time I saw Inigo,” the financier says ruefully.
Philbrick’s downfall came in 2019, when he sold shares in a portrait of Picasso by the trendy New York artist Rudof Stingel to different buyers (neither of whom knew the other existed) and then promised that Christie’s had guaranteed a $9 million sale price when the work came to market. Had the sale achieved that price, Philbrick would have been off the hook because each client would have made a good profit. But the painting was sold for just $5.5 million.
“From that moment I was dead,” Philbrick says, because he knew there was no $9 million guarantee from Christie’s to fall back on. He then forged a Christie’s guarantee to buy himself time. When that deception was uncovered — as it inevitably would be — he fled to the South Pacific, and the FBI’s hunt for him started.
Few of those involved emerge well from this saga. Some associates who now denounce him also cheerfully reminisce in the documentary about the good times they shared with him and the money they made together when, they say, his activities were still legitimate. At least his partner Victoria — who at first comes across as the very epitome of the cynical good-time girl — stood by Philbrick through his trial and imprisonment. They are now married and have two children (Philbrick’s oldest child, by a previous relationship, isn’t mentioned in the program).
Yet even Victoria seems delusional about how Philbrick’s misdeeds must seem to ordinary people. When asked if she knew the full extent of his law-breaking, she replies: “Everyone breaks the law.” You do wonder whether both of them regard laws as boring things that apply to lesser mortals, not to art dealers on a coke-fueled merry-go-round of perpetual partying around the globe.
As for Philbrick, he doesn’t seem like a repentant sinner, overwhelmed by guilt at the trouble he caused. He admits he did things that were wrong, but then adds: “There’s a small part of me that thinks, what about all the good deals?” And he definitely believes that he can “earn his seat at the table again” — in other words, resume what was a phenomenally successful career in a business that seems to have almost no checks on how dealers operate, as long as they operate profitably.
Undoubtedly the documentary will prompt more earnest demands for the art market to be regulated. But authors such as the academic and economist Don Thompson, who specializes in exposing the scammers and grifters of the art world, have been calling for reform for years (Thompson’s riveting first book on the subject, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, actually came out in 2008, just as Philbrick was wheedling his way into Jopling’s inner circle). Martin Roth, former director of the V&A, even went so far as to call the art market a “camouflage” for money laundering.
Nothing has been done to address such accusations, and probably nothing will. Does that really matter though, in a world with so many bigger problems? Philbrick may well have perpetrated art frauds on an industrial scale. But he’s famous because he got caught, not because he’s unique. I would be amazed if, wafting around the rarefied salesrooms and art fairs, other plausible charmers aren’t engaged in exactly the same sort of shady deals. And frankly, when the victims are incredibly wealthy people whose only interest in art is to store it in a warehouse until its value rises and it can be resold for a whacking profit, why should the rest of us care very much?
Richard Morrison is the chief culture writer at The Times of London
