All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art
by
Orlando Whitfield
Published 5 Aug 2024
* * * — But my story starts more than a decade before any of this – long before I started a gallery; before I learnt to lie as easily as I breathed air; long before art was reduced in my eyes to no more than numbers on a spreadsheet; before I had even thought of entering the art world at all. My story starts with a friendship; with a young man called Inigo Philbrick. When you embark on something at twenty, which is when Inigo and I, inexperienced and wet behind the ears, started dealing art together, there’s no telling where it will go, how boundless an opportunity it might reveal itself to be. It was the beginning of a friendship which, more and longer than any other, has shaped the way I experience and confront the world, and the whole direction of my adult life.
…
But Inigo was young and brash, and he got caught; sometimes I think it was simply the combination of all three which did for him. * * * — One morning towards the end of October 2019, just weeks after he’d vanished, I woke to an email from British Airways which read: ‘We want to let you know that Mr Inigo Philbrick has added you to their Family and Friends list. That means they can book reward flights for you with their Avios, which is the currency of the British Airways Executive Club frequent flyer programme.’ I sent him a screenshot of the email via the messaging app Telegram. ‘Does this mean you’re not coming back?’
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While I’m not aware that he ever had a job title per se, from what I saw I think it would not be unfair to characterise him as having been Inigo’s consigliere. He opened up a world of financial trickery that Inigo had only begun to know existed. As Rob pulled back the curtain, the possibilities must have seemed boundless. The split that was eventually agreed to resulted in changing the name of the gallery from Modern Collections to Inigo Philbrick Gallery, as well as a change of livery from frothy white to a murky grey. By the end of 2014, Inigo had moved out of the space at 89 Mount Street and was renovating a new gallery on Davies Street, smack opposite his new favourite restaurant, Cipriani. The new space was in keeping with his increasingly private business model: it had no street frontage, just a brass doorbell and a door that opened on to a long, parquet-floored corridor – it didn’t even have windows.
Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
by
Michael Shnayerson
Published 20 May 2019
In alphabetical order they are: Bill Acquavella, Alex Adler, Hilton Als, Ian Alteveer, Max Anderson, Richard Armstrong, Andy Augenblick, Frances Beatty, Olivier Berggruen, Donald and Vera Blinken, Howard Blum, Irving and Jackie Blum, Marianne Boesky, Mary Boone, Stefania Bortolami, Adam Boxer, Sarah Braman, Peter Brant, Gavin Brown, Patty Brundage, Susan Brundage, Suzanne Butler, Priscilla Caldwell, Tom Campbell, Amy Cappellazzo, James Cohan, Lisa Cooley, Paula Cooper, Michael Craig-Martin, Doug Cramer, Anthony d’Offay, Meredith Darrow, Brett De Palma, Elizabeth Dee, Jeffrey Deitch, Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, Catherine Dunn, Asher Edelman, Milton Esterow, Richard Feigen, Michael Findlay, Jack Flam, José Freire, François Ghebaly, Ralph Gibson, Barbara Gladstone, Marc Glimcher, Aaron Richard Golub, John Good, Marian Goodman, Jay Gorney, Phil Grauer, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Patty Hambrecht, Ben Heller, Steven Henry, Antonio Homem, Jim Jacobs, Carroll Janis, Julia Joern, John Kasmin, Paul Kasmin, Bill Kelly, Christoph Kerres, Anselm Kiefer, Nicole Klagsbrun, James Koch, David Kordansky, Sharon Cohen Levin, Dominique Lévy, Nicholas Logsdail, Michele Maccarone, Christy MacLear, Gerard Malanga, Don Marron, Fergus McCaffrey, Jamie Niven, Annina Nosei, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Marc Payot, Emmanuel Perrotin, Inigo Philbrick, Robert Pincus-Witten, Annie Plumb, Jeff Poe, Marc Porter, Eva Presenhuber, Dotson Rader, William Rayner, Janelle Reiring, John Richardson, Walter Robinson, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Thaddaeus Ropac, Brie Ruais, Don and Mera Rubell, David Salle, Irving Sandler, Kenny Schachter, Lisa Schiff, Vito Schnabel, Allan Schwartzman, John Seed, Tony Shafrazi, Jack Shainman, Stefan Simchowitz, Richard Solomon, Morgan Spangle, Lisa Spellman, Ron Spencer, Monika Sprüth, Frank Stella, Robert Storr, Andrew Terner, Sheena Wagstaff, Thea Westreich, Angela Westwater, Jack Youngerman, John Zinsser, Allison Zuckerman, Lucas Zwirner.