At one point during Dan Mangan’s superb performance with the National Arts Centre Orchestra a couple of months ago, the popular Vancouver singer-songwriter and father of two revealed that listening to classical music helps him relieve stress and get centred before a show.
Then he stepped to the side, letting Ottawa’s world-class orchestra demonstrate the calming effect of one of his favourite pieces, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The near-capacity audience, a youthful crowd that looked to be mostly under 45 or so, was rapt. No one ducked out for drinks or yacked during the moving piece, which was the evening’s only departure from Mangan’s repertoire.
The concert was part of the NAC’s Sessions series, an initiative that matches Canadian singer-songwriters with the orchestra, and provides support in commissioning orchestral arrangements of their songs. It’s a collaboration between two NAC departments — NACO and NAC Presents — and it’s been an unqualified success. Both Mangan and the orchestra received multiple standing ovations that night, with a similar reaction every time NACO backs a popular musician. Other instalments of the series have featured pop-music artists such as Patrick Watson, Stars and Jann Arden.
Part of the objective of the Sessions series is to develop the artistry of Canadian singer-songwriters, but it’s also designed to expose younger audiences to the orchestra. Thanks to Mangan’s genuine warmth and down-to-earth demeanour, in his jeans and untucked shirt, not to mention his obvious respect for the orchestra, it appeared to work like a charm. One example was a friend who brought his rock guitar-playing teenage son to the concert. “How come you’ve never taken me to the orchestra before?” was the young musician’s reaction.
That’s the kind of feedback that delights the NAC’s top brass. Aging audiences have been a concern for the orchestra industry in Europe and North America for decades, especially since the 2008 economic downturn and the subsequent rise of digital technology. People have more entertainment options than ever before, and most of those options are readily available at all times without having to budge from the couch.
“Greying audiences, this is something that we have been talking about and thinking about in the industry since I joined 19 years ago,” said Arna Einarsdóttir, the NAC’s relatively new managing director of the orchestra, who came from a similar job with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra in her homeland. “Times change so fast now and there’s so much competition for people’s time and everything is so accessible on your phone. Of course you have to be adapting to this in different ways.”
(Japan is one country where it’s a different story, largely because of a strong tradition of music education in schools. There are more than 1,500 amateur and professional orchestras in the country, including no fewer than nine full-time, professional orchestras in Tokyo alone.)
It’s important to note that Canadians still love to consume culture. In a 2016 study on Canadians’ Arts, Culture, and Heritage Participation, funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage and the Ontario Arts Council, researchers found nearly nine in 10 Canadians (aged 15 and over) attended an art gallery, arts performance, artistic or culture festival or a movie theatre monthly. Even when movie theatre attendance was excluded, 73 per cent of Canadians attended an arts performance or exhibition.
The report also found that participation rates in the arts have increased over 25 years. There were strong increases in art gallery and historic site attendance rates between 1992 and 2016, while movie theatres, museums, and other heritage activities also saw increasing attendance rates.
Still, there’s no question that audiences and their tastes are changing as millennials age and the population diversifies. This is clear in the findings of the first Culture Track report, a 2018 survey of cultural consumers in Canada, that shows allophones, those whose first language is neither English nor French, are more likely to attend a cultural event than anglophones or francophones, and millennials are the demographic most likely to participate monthly in a cultural activity such as visiting a music festival or museum.
In Ottawa, two of the country’s most important cultural institutions — the National Arts Centre and the National Gallery of Canada — have been responding to shifting demographic tastes by attempting to introduce culturally diverse content that appeals to a broad age range. Both institutions also have dynamic new leadership in place to take them into the next decade.
Of course, the National Arts Centre is uniquely positioned in the arts world to deal with these challenges — the resident orchestra under the direction of maestro Alexander Shelley, 40, is only the start of its offerings. There are departments devoted to dance, English theatre, French theatre, variety and popular music, plus the newest branch, Indigenous theatre, which launched last year and was touted as the world’s first national Indigenous theatre program. What’s more, under its roof are four stages of different sizes, along with attractive public spaces gained in the recent renovation of the building.
“Where else can you go where you can go to a single hall in a small city and see the finest dance in the world, have a really first-class orchestra, theatre in two languages, a great meal and a popular music series, which includes the youngest of artists all the way to the heavy hitters on the main stage? And it’s all at a relatively modest ticket price. It’s a very remarkable institution,” said Sarah Jennings, a former arts journalist and author of Art and Politics: The History of the National Arts Centre. A second edition of the 2009 book came out last year.
Artistic directors and staff in each department are continually working to adapt to audience demographics while maintaining the quality of the shows. The orchestra has a multi-generational approach that includes the core classical programming and the Sessions series, as well as Casual Fridays, with pre- and post-concert hobnobbing for young professionals, the Family Adventures series for parents and children, and the ever-popular Pops series, featuring the orchestra performing a program ranging from movie scores to 80s music to the Beatles, to name a few themes. Also important are the community outreach and education programs that bring orchestra musicians to schools, often taking the place of music classes.
“Music education in school systems is getting less and less, and Canada is no different from other western countries in cutting down on creative subjects,” said Einarsdóttir. “I actually feel we’re robbing our children of such a key and fundamental thing in being human. So while our communities are not realizing this, we are taking on the role and doing community engagement all over the country.”
Meanwhile, the English theatre department under Jillian Keiley has long been committed to diversifying the voices on its stages, including plays that feature actors with disabilities, those written by women and works by culturally diverse playwrights such as Jeff Ho and Jivesh Parasram. As for the dance programming, curated by Cathy Levy, it’s considered among the best in the country, with a thoughtful balance between classic ballet performances and innovative modern-dance works.
The NAC Presents concert series, which features mostly Canadian singer-songwriters, is the most radical programming change in the institution’s history, a significant departure from the centre’s previous focus on the so-called high arts of theatre, orchestra and dance. (Opera faded away with the demise of Ottawa’s Opera Lyra in 2011.)
Launched in 2011, the same year opera died, NAC Presents was an immediate success and has grown to include a whopping 150 concerts in the 2019-20 season, featuring a wide range of emerging and established artists, from Jann Arden to Zaki Ibrahim.
The sub-series, Fridays at the Fourth, has also proved popular, presenting lesser known artists in the 150-person capacity Fourth Stage with a $15 ticket ($10 for students) available at the door.
“The idea that only a certain kind of people come to the NAC is immediately debunked in my department,” says Heather Gibson, who’s executive producer of NAC Presents and in charge of popular music and variety programming. “It took two years but now we’re at a point that Fridays at the Fourth are almost always sold out, and we know from asking the audience that 50 per cent don’t know what they’ve come to see, they’re just coming to see live music. It’s a discovery series.”
Adding to the sense of discovery is the fact that Fridays at the Fourth concerts are now livestreamed on the NAC Presents Facebook page. Online viewership has been growing slowly since the endeavour started last year, but the Silent Winters concert in December saw a big spike in traffic. According to Gibson, more than 900 people around the world watched the Ottawa folk duo perform their Christmas show.
Naturally, the goal is still to get actual bums in seats, and those numbers are encouraging. Officials say overall NAC attendance is back on track, with close to one million visitors last year, after a dip during the $225.4-million architectural renewal project that was unveiled on July 1, 2017. The building remained open during construction, although programming was limited.
Much of the new energy at the NAC can be attributed to former CEO Peter Herrndorf, who took over leadership of the institution in 1999 at a time when the organization was in “complete disarray,” writes Jennings in her book.
During his 19 years at the helm, Herrndorf championed the pursuit of private donations, re-emphasized the institution’s national mandate through education and outreach programs and pushed for the building’s renovation as part of his overall vision for greater accessibility to the arts. The reno included the Kipnes Lantern, the dramatic glass tower of video projections that serves as a beacon at the Elgin Street entrance. It’s a large improvement to the street facade of the formerly bunker-like building.
The newly created public spaces allow for free programming such as a weekly powwow workout class, meditation group, Toddler Tuesday activities for pre-schoolers, and even occasional concerts, also free. With a coffee shop, funky chairs and a free Wi-Fi network, what used to be a dead zone during the day is now a well-equipped spot to hang out. There was even a new position created, a director of visitor experience, to oversee all of the details of an NAC visit, whether or not you’re buying a ticket.
Not long after Herrndorf retired in June 2018, Christopher Deacon, the former managing director of the orchestra, assumed the top job, the first CEO to be appointed from within the organization. He has a strong belief in the intrinsic value of the performing arts, but has seen big shifts in ticket-buying habits and audience engagement throughout the arts industry.
In an interview in his canal-side office, Deacon said today’s audiences are less inclined to buy a subscription package to an entire season of plays, orchestra concerts or dance performances, but more likely to buy single tickets. He estimates the ratio has shifted from a 65 per cent subscription rate, with 35 per cent singles, to about 40 per cent subscriptions and the rest singles.
“The model the performing arts have been using for years is the subscription model,” Deacon said. “It was something that people found suited the tempo of life 20 years ago, and some people still find it convenient, but the majority now are single tickets.”
While this means a less predictable revenue stream for the presenter, social media makes it possible to connect with a wider audience in a shorter time frame. “We have a new set of challenges with respect to marketing and attendance because of that shift towards single tickets, but there are also upsides because single-ticket buyers tend to be younger and more diverse,” Deacon said.
In Jennings’ opinion, getting the word out is now the institution’s biggest challenge. “The arts centre has a lot to do in terms of reaching its public but it’s got a really good talent amongst its artistic leadership. It’s for the corporate structure to become more nimble and flexible in adapting to this new world. They’ve got the product, they now have to make sure the public is aware of what they’ve got,” she said.
Another factor working in favour of the NAC is a robust fundraising arm, the National Arts Centre Foundation, which received a landmark $10-million donation last year from philanthropists Earle and Janice O’Born. Funds raised by the foundation support artistic endeavours, new creations and educational programs at the NAC.
“Not only did the O’Borns make a donation, but they did it in a way that wasn’t necessarily targeted. They’ve gotten to know people in the company and they’re excited by what the artistic directors are doing. It’s an expression of confidence in the leadership team,” said Deacon.
“For me, as a relatively new fundraiser, I’m taking a lesson from that. People give to people. This is hopefully a growing crescendo in philanthropic circles in Canada that the arts are a really good investment.”
“We are sad to announce Camden art collective have left the building after being served papers yesterday,” the post read. “We wish those left in the building the best of luck in their endeavours. We hope to be a part of the community again soon, watch this space!!”
The account did not specify who is left in the building, and London’s Metropolitan Police could not immediately be reached by PEOPLE for comment.
On April 13, BBC reported that the Central London pub had been occupied by at least six people, who allegedly boarded the windows. PEOPLE confirmed on April 15 that Ramsay’s pub had been occupied by squatters.
The building where York & Albany was located and rented by Ramsay was listed on the market for £13 million, or about $16 million U.S. dollars, in December.
The Camden Art Cafe spoke about the price when they shared an official statement on April 15 about occupying the building.
“We aim to open our doors regularly to anyone and everyone, particularly the people of Camden who have been victims of gentrification and parasitic projects like HS2,” the statement said, adding that they will provide free food and “space to display their art without the ridiculous red-tape that galleries require people to jump over.”
The post continued, talking about how the wealth disparities in Camden made it “fitting that £13 million properties that most locals would never be able to afford to visit should be opened up to all.”
On April 15, the Metropolitan Police told PEOPLE that they were made aware of the squatters at a “disused property” near London’s Regent’s Park on April 10.
“This is a civil matter and so police did not attend as an emergency call out,” the statement continued.
In the statement, the police said they would get involved if necessary: “We [are] in the process of identifying if any subsequent offences [sic] have occurred, and will take action where appropriate.”
Ramsay’s team declined to comment on the situation since it is being handled legally.
According to the U.K.’s official squatter rules on the government website, “Simply being on another person’s non-residential property without their permission is not usually a crime.”
But the website lists vandalization, not leaving when ordered by the court and using utilities as crimes that would permit police involvement.
Orlando Whitfield is a youngish man, shy, with a reddish beard. His hands are aggressively tattooed, as if they’d been laid, backs down, on wet newspaper. The ink is a form of armour, he says, like his pranking brand of humour (for a while his iCloud hotspotwas “Lord Lucan’s iPhone”). But he’s earnest, too, quick to draw on a literary quotation. Today he has arrived at lunch apologetic and soaked through, having been caught on his bike in a downpour.
We’ve met at the Academy Club – his choice – an old-timers’ haunt in Soho, London, with black oilcloths on tables and stained wainscotting. “Hogarth’s dining room,” he calls it. We’re here to discuss his former best friend Inigo Philbrick, the London-based American art dealer who swindled friends, business associates, investors and collectors out of millions of dollars before going on the run in 2019. Philbrick, 36, was jailed in 2020. In 2022 he was sentenced to seven years for wire fraud and ordered to forfeit $86m (£68m). A stunned art world is still puzzling over how he pulled off this heist. The maître d’ brings a fan heater to dry Whitfield’s jeans.
Whitfield, 37, is not the obvious candidate to lay a grenade under the art market – which had a global estimated value in transactions of $65bn in 2023. Yet arguably that’s what he’s doing by laying blame with the systemas much as Philbrick in his book All That Glitters. It details his decade hustling alongside Philbrick, caught in such exploits as twice trying to remove Banksy graffiti from private property; couriering, possibly illegally, a Lucian Freud in hand luggage on a transatlantic flight; selling a Paula Rego for cash in a Lisbon hotel room, as well as making hundred-thousand-dollar deals in seconds on the strength of an iPhone photo.
He describes the art market as a corrupt, unregulated orbit sloshing with drugs, $5,000 bottles of wine, yachts, private jets, prostitution, and populated with oligarchs and “sons and daughters of the sinister rich” – all built around betting on “wildly unstable assets of no intrinsic value”. In the end being a part of it made him sick (literally). But Whitfield’s crazed escapades contract to microscopic next to those of Philbrick, whom the FBI says committed the largest art fraud in American history. He dealt in the “secondary” market – reselling pieces that have been sold before – to individual collectors and investors who grouped together for high-value works.
He focused on select artists, including Christopher Wool, Wade Guyton and Rudolf Stingel, betting on them at auction, driving their value up by millions. He stood accused of identity theft, forging documents (including from Christie’s), selling paintings without their owner’s knowledge, inventing collectors who didn’t exist, and of overselling fractional shares in single paintings (adding up to 220% of one work’s value). When a federal judge in Manhattan asked him why he had done all this, Philbrick replied, “Money, your honour. I was trying to find business and I needed money for that.”
Many rich friends and business associates – the FBI identified 24 – are still processing the extent to which they were conned. Among them: British property dealers David and Simon Reuben, through Simon’s daughter Lisa, who ran their art fund Guzzini Partners; businessman and collector Andre Sakhai (whose own father, Ely, ironically, was convicted of art forgery); investor Aleksander “Sasha” Pesko; gallerist Damian Delahunty; Jay Jopling, owner of White Cube, whose secondary market business Modern Collections Philbrick ran and who has suffered “substantial financial loss”, according to a spokesperson.
Jopling features large in Philbrick’s story. The man who launched the Young British Artists (YBAs), including Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, was Philbrick’s mentor. He gave Philbrick an internship, paid his college fees, employed him, gave him a £500,000 fund to run and later went into business with him. “It has hurt and saddened me that Mr Philbrick, whom I respected and whose early career I supported, has not only betrayed my trust but … that of many others,” Jopling said in 2022.
The artist and writer Kenny Schachter, who lost $1.75m to Philbrick, described him as “the art world’s mini-Madoff” (a reference to Ponzi scheme financier Bernie) in a furious article for Vulture. Schachter thought they were close friends – he reeled off trips to St Moritz, Spain, Dijon, Milan, Paris “on jets Philbrick had chartered”– as well as riotous nights on MDMA and “industrial” quantities of wine and Monkey 47 gin. When he realised what Philbrick had done, he messaged him: “You’re like The Talented Mr Ripley.”
So Philbrick lied, betrayed and manipulated everyone in his circle. Truly, he was the bad art friend. Why is Whitfield telling his story? What he tells me over lunch is this: it started as collaboration, it ended as exorcism.
Whitfield’s friendship with Philbrick dates back to 2007 when they were students at Goldsmiths, University of London. Over near-15 years their lives entwined: they worked together, set up a business, shared a flat. “Inigo and I always used to joke we would write each other’s biographies, that we knew each other well enough to be both Boswell and Johnson to each other,” he says.
Whitfield first made smirking eye contact with Philbrick when a student coming late to a class was told they were studying the male gaze and said, “I thought we weren’t meant to call them that any more … The male gays.” Philbrick, Whitfield says, was “effete” with “bee-stung lips” and “a wild mess of hair”, the sort to talk about skincare and pieces in the New York Times.
Both were 19, but Philbrick had “the assurance and poise” of someone much older. “I can’t say he was popular,” Whitfield writes. “Then again, I wasn’t, either.” One evening, Philbrick invited him to a party in his eccentric lodgings near the British Museum. They stayed up until dawn “fuelled” by cocaine laid out on a novel by Edward St Aubyn, a writer they discussed with intensity.
They agreed to meet in New York that summer. Whitfield was to be interning at Christie’s, where his father had worked as an auctioneer, while Philbrick would be shuttling between divorced parents – his father, Harry, was director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut; his mother, Jane, a Harvard-educated artist who teaches at Parsons in New York. Whereas Whitfield’s own father was “a man sutured to a corduroy armchair, listening to Wagner and drinking shitty red wine”, Philbrick’s “drank beer and listened to Neil Young and, you know, would take us to bars”. It was through his parents’ connections that Philbrick had already started interning at White Cube, where he was working on an exhibition by Gilbert & George.
These were heady days. Whitfield felt “intoxicated”: “I’d never had a friend like Inigo, someone to discuss books and films and art and music with in an unabashedly earnest fashion.” The friendship was the most formative of his life, he says – a statement borne out by the detail he remembers of their encounters, down to Philbrick’s tortoiseshell Ray-Bans, mismatched socks and “startling” childlike handwriting. He can summon Philbrick’s voice in his head, the soubriquets he used: “Dude”, “playboy”, “big boy”, “bro”. “I almost studied him, in the way a painter will study the brushstrokes of the old masters or a writer Hemingway’s sentence structure.” He noticed how Philbrick compartmentalised his life, while allowing Whitfield close enough access “to know that there was a secret”.
Around this time, Philbrick asked Whitfield if he’d like to work with him, “putting together a few deals”, and Whitfield agreed “without hesitation”. They set up I&O Fine Art and their first deal was on a painting by Paula Rego. The owner had been offered £4,000 by her London dealer and asked Philbrick if he thought he could get more. Through Goldsmiths, Philbrick made contact with a Spanish dealer, and through him, a Portuguese dealer, who offered them €15,000 cash – €12,000 for the owner; €1,500 each for them.
Whitfield says it “happened in a blur”: they flew to Lisbon, the Rego between them, and after dinner, the dealer handed over a fat envelope of euros. Easy. Delirious, they ordered champagne from room service and Whitfield “did that thing you see in hip-hop videos of throwing a pile of cash into the air”.
That autumn, Philbrick demonstrated his unusual nous when he sent Whitfield a photo of a pair of industrial doors from a building in Hoxton. At the bottom was graffiti: a rat wearing a baseball cap holding a beatbox on his shoulder. Philbrick had also sent it to a contact at Phillips auctioneers who’d told him it was Banksy, worth £80-£90,000. Philbrick wanted Whitfield’s help buying the doors off the building supervisor by offering him £10,000. The supervisor said he’d get back to them. But the following Monday Whitfield answered his phone to Philbrick. “They fucked us!” he was shouting. “The door, it’s fucking gone!”
A few months later, Philbrick took Whitfield to Clerkenwell where, next to a motorcycle shop on a wall by an empty lot, was a large painting: four stencilled figures of old people wearing streetwear, one sitting on a beatbox. Above, in pink spray paint, the words OLD SKOOL. This would be worth significantly more than the rat, they realised. Only, how to remove it? After weeks of research, they found a builder who agreed to attempt it and approached the manager of the motorcycle shop. “You’re too late, I’m afraid,” he told them. “German fella bought it.” The fella had paid £1,000. In 2012, this Banksy was valued at £300,000.
At White Cube, meanwhile, Philbrick’s knowledge and brio came to the attention of Jopling, who offered him a “proper” job. Philbrick swapped the jeans and Chelsea boots for brown brogues, grey flannels, open-necked white shirts. “Inigo became the adult in our relationship, a dismissive older brother whom I couldn’t help but want to please,” Whitfield recalls. Philbrick started attending Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Brutally Early Club, to discuss ideas over coffee at 6.30am, and became actual friends with Gilbert & George, as well as Sir Norman Rosenthal, former exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy. (“One of the many relationships I saw go sour,” Whitfield says. “No real idea why. It seemed all his relationships were transactional and therefore mostly had use-by dates.”)
In 2009, their relationship was put back on an even footing when the two friends took a flat together in Camberwell, south London. Philbrick was adapting quickly to the sorcery of the art market, as assistant collection manager at Jopling’s Modern Collections. A limited company to hold Jopling’s personal art collection, it contained some gems, but also lesser pieces he began to sell at auction. With the proceeds Philbrick sought “new opportunities”, artists he thought undervalued.
But Jopling frustrated him, he told Whitfield. For instance, “[Philbrick] would negotiate an artwork that he and Jopling had agreed was a good buy at, say, $700k down to $625k, only for Jopling to do an about-face, saying he wanted to buy it for $600k and telling Inigo to walk away from the deal.” Philbrick’s recourse? He’d tell Jopling he’d bought for the lower number when asking for payment authorisation. “When Jopling replied with his approval, Inigo would then alter the number in the email chain and forward it to the accounts team.” Philbrick’s salary rose quickly, from £35,000 a year to £35,000 a month. He was 23 years old.
By autumn 2011, Jopling’s faith in Philbrick had grown so enormous, he gave him the keys to a gallery at 89 Mount Street in Mayfair. Here, Philbrick opened with a show of Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker. Walker had been selling for $30-$40,000, but prices soon leapt to almost $1m.A piece in the Art Newspaper cautioned: was this Too Much Too Young?It quoted dealers and advisers who saw these trades as “irresponsible”, “inappropriate” and “confusing”. Philbrick sided with the art dealer David Zwirner, who argued it was just “pioneering different business models”.
To understand the tide Philbrick was riding, Whitfield explains how the art market was changing at this time. The gold rush had begun with the YBAs in the 90s and was driven by cash from the former Soviet Union, the dotcom boom, the explosion in PR know-how, and opportunistic collectors such as Charles Saatchi. Once an artist is established and their work comes up at auction, the estimate is gauged by what the market might pay. It’s in collectors’ interests to make sure all pieces by artists they own remain buoyant, so as not to tank the value of investments. Ergo, there are a number of rich interested parties. If an artist’s stock goes down, dealers face their wrath. “Sometimes galleries from different countries representing the same artist will band together to protect the market by bidding up the price of the work at auction, or even purchasing it back,” Whitfield says.
Art is an asset class. Works bought for investment are often not put on walls, but kept in locked storage in places such as Switzerland, to avoid tax (and divorce lawyers). “Specullectors” spread risk by buying shares of a valuable work, with the explicit intention to resell when the market rises. Unlike property, there’s no way to check ownership (unless there’s a loan against a work), so unscrupulous dealers can keep buying then reselling work at increasing prices, manipulating the market.
By late 2011, Philbrick had moved out of Camberwell and in with his girlfriend in Mayfair. The next summer, he invited Whitfield to meet him at the Mount Street gallery and afterwards for a drink. As they walked into the Connaught hotel bar, Whitfield noticed how he peeled off £20 notes and pressed them on staff. Once seated, Philbrick offered him a job: publications manager – thinking up themes to tie disparate artworks together for gallery exhibitions, then writing up the brochures.
It didn’t sound too bad, certainly better than the publishing job he had at the time. “I convinced myself that I could use Modern Collections as a launch pad to greatness,” Whitfield says. “But delusion has always been a strong suit.” He describes the difference between him and Philbrick: “He wore Milanese suits, Loro Piana shoes and was driven in a blacked-out Mercedes; I cycled to work and wore my keys on a clip on my belt.”
Whitfield saw little of Philbrick at the gallery – he was “seldom in the same time zone” – and it was around then that Kenny Schachter met Philbrick. They quickly became “art-world wingmen”. “Friends would accuse me of loving [Philbrick] and I can’t deny that,” Schachter wrote for Vulture. “Not in a physical way so much, though there was admittedly a lot of horsing around.”
Schachter had money, but Philbrick helped make him a good deal more. He’d sell him a Wool for $800,000 or a Stingel for a million, then they’d flip it “and both pocket a few hundred”. Schachter was amazed at the way Philbrick used a network of proxies, “even actors playing an art-interested version of themselves to starstruck gallerists”, to help him procure works to flip.
While both liked partying, Philbrick had a “hefty appetite for drugs”, Schachter says, and “the company of prostitutes”. As time went on, this appeared to affect hisjudgment and he became dangerously fearless: “He was rarely without MDMA or ketamine brazenly carried in his briefcase or pocket from one airport to another.” (Philbrick’s lawyer acknowledged his use of alcohol and drugs, stating this “intensified as he entered London’s art world” and was “how art deals are done”.)
By now Philbrick had upgraded his Rolex for a 5990 Patek Philippe Nautilus, his suits were $7,000 a piece and he was boasting about buying Gio Ponti furniture. He was doing his deals in Cipriani in Mayfair, a hedge fund hangout where he had a house account. A side-note is that he simultaneously had time for a relationship with Francisca Mancini, an Argentinian artist, with whom he had a daughter in April 2017. By then he’d also met – on the yacht of investor Sasha Pesko – Victoria Baker-Harber, a cast member of Made in Chelsea, and begun ferocious pursuit. Some months later, he left Mancini and began a relationship with Baker-Harber, with whom he now has a three-year-old daughter.
It was in Cipriani in January 2017 that Whitfield himself did “the biggest deal I have ever pulled off” when he sold a Christopher Wool to Philbrick. He had stopped working for Modern Collections in the summer of 2016 and was now running his own gallery. The Wool had been offered to him by another dealer, a friend, but he had been explicitly told not to sell it to Philbrick. So, here he was doing the dirty on that dealer-friend.
On his iPhone lying on the table between their gin gimlets, “the Wool looks far from impressive – but that is hardly important to Inigo,” Whitfield writes. “What we’re looking at is a sales document, a trade … This is business, not art.” Philbrick looked at it “for no more than five seconds”. Whitfield asked for $600k, Philbrick offered $450k. They agreed on $500k. “It was that easy. It made me feel like a fraud.”
The payment terms were 30 days. All Whitfield had to do was keep his dealer calm. But 30 days elapsed and the dealer was calling every hour to ask where the money was. Philbrick was stalling. Instead of paying, he booked Whitfield on a first-class flight to New York, and Whitfield went, thinking surely this would finalise the deal. After a crazed night, reminiscent of a St Aubyn novel, Philbrick disappeared, leaving just a scribbled note saying he’d gone to Arkansas.
With no payment and in a panic, Whitfield transferred from his own nascent business a 10% deposit of $50,000 to the seller. It was everything he had. Days passed. Whitfield texted Philbrick. “Come on, man, can you please just let me know what’s going on?” The reply was terse, dismissive. Philbrick was busy, he said: Whitfield should learn to “manage his clients”.
More days passed, then another week. Whitfield was beside himself, unable to sleep and suffering from heart palpitations. The invoice was four weeks overdue and Whitfield was looking at losing everything if the seller kept his deposit and cancelled the sale. He went to see Philbrick in person, but at the gallery, staff blocked his path. Philbrick was in a meeting, they said. “You know he’s not going to see you, Orlando.” Whitfield sloped home in despair. Three days later, the money miraculously arrived. He never found out why Philbrick had delayed it so long: “He was evasive when I asked.” But here’s a weird thing: the eventual auction estimate in June 2017 was $150-$200k, far less than Philbrick had paid. It sold in London for £293k, a loss of over $125k.
After that, everything changed. Whitfield believes the stress over that deal, compounded by other issues – the breakup of a relationship, the death of his father – contributed to a dependency on Xanax and tramadol, and an eventual breakdown. In February 2018 he spent two weeks in a psychiatric ward, at first on suicide watch. In treatment, he made a decision to give up his career as a dealer. “It was,” he says now, “a lot harder than quitting drugs. I don’t take Xanax any more, but I still pick up every art dealer’s call when they’ve got gossip for me.”
His abiding advice? “I’d never recommend anyone to invest in art, I think it’s an incredibly poor idea.”
Whitfield began a new, quieter, life. First, he worked as an apprentice paper conservator in London and then – turning the bedroom that had once been rented by Philbrick into an office – he began to write. It was a career he had thought of pursuing years earlier, even applying for a creative writing postgraduate degree. He wanted to write about the art world, he knew that. About his experiences, the corruption. He’d drawn up a proposal and sent it to publishers. Then something fell into his lap: Philbrick got back in touch.
Whitfield knew from news reports that Philbrick had vanished from Miami in October 2019, his creditors in meltdown. So he was surprised to open an email from British Airways telling him he’d been added to Philbrick’s “friends and family list” (meaning he could benefit from Philbrick’s airline rewards). “Does this mean you’re not coming back?” he hastily messaged on Telegram. “Not for a while,” Philbrick replied, then went quiet again. Whitfield could see by the double ticks that he was reading messages and links he was sending from the international press.
When Philbrick finally surfaced again it was over a patchy line from the Pacific island of Vanuatu. He’d bought a beach-front house in Mele, he said. A Doberman puppy, Bacchus, was audible in the background of what became regular calls to discuss the media coverage. “They don’t even have 10% of what I did,” Philbrick said.
What he wanted, he told Whitfield, was for them to collaborate on a magazine piece putting forward his side of the story. The way he told it, Whitfield says, “he was just a young man in over his head”. And Whitfield believed him. Next, Philbrick emailed him “an enormous trove” of documents – spreadsheets, correspondence, details of financial dealings that stretched back years. Philbrick told him, “For better or worse … I have a little star power just now. I’m hoping some of that might rub off on you. Good for both of us.”
Philbrick clearly thought he was safe – Vanuatu has no extradition treaty with the US. But on 11 June 2020, out shopping in the local market with Baker-Harber, he was confronted by police in flak jackets. They bundled him into a red Ford and on to a Gulfstream V, and he was flown to Guam, a US territory, then to the US.
At that point, Whitfield had written only 2,500 words. It was a story Philbrick told him about buying a painting by Rudolf Stingel for $300,000, through an insurance company contact. The work had been worth $3m but had been written off because of severe water damage. Philbrick claimed he’d restored it, sourcing the original gold enamel paint and respraying the 2 metre x 2.5 metre canvas in a lock-up garage in Mayfair in 2018.
He had already sold it into a fund he ran for an Israeli-Canadian billionaire for $1.75m. Then he resold it for $2.5m into a fund he joint-owned with Jopling. (A mark of how hard it is to pin down the truth in Philbrick’s accounts is this: Schachter claims Philbrick wanted to buy the Stingel from an insurance company, but was refused, so created an exact replica. The current whereabouts of the painting/replica is unknown.)
They could no longer speak, but Philbrick was emailing Whitfield as he was moved through different facilities, joking at one point that he hoped he wouldn’t get the “Epstein Suite” atthe Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York. “Quite funny, to be fair,” Whitfield says now. “He is irreverent. Could always make me laugh like nobody else. He had an amazing kind of easy-come easy-go [attitude].” Understandable, “if you’ve made that much money by the time you’re 30”.
Left going through the “trove”, Whitfield quickly saw the volume of information could not be distilled into one article. The sheer complexity of Philbrick’s crimes was baffling – “Still now I don’t know if I’ve really figured it all out” – and piecing it together was “like working on a jigsaw big enough to cover a football pitch”.
Philbrick knew Whitfield was writing an art world book. “But at a certain point, I realised there was no way of me being able to write my story without writing parts of his.” Not only were they “inextricably” bound, but “his story was emblematic of everything that I felt was bad about the art market”. After he told Philbrick this, communication stopped. By the time he’d waded through all the documents, “any collaboration between him and me had become impossible. I had to go it alone.”
So Whitfield sat at his desk, wrote a Rachel Cusk quote on a Post-it – “Wanting people to like you corrupts your writing” – and stuck it on his computer. Coffee in hand, he got to his desk at 7am daily for the next year. At one point he saw his relationship with Philbrick as like Nick Carraway’s with Jay Gatsby. “I was sort of trying to write bad Gatsby. Because Jay was a good guy in the end.”
The chapter Whitfield called in his head What Inigo Did he wrote last, having read all the documents he had been sent, as well as those of the court case. “I went through a real-life curtain reveal. Until then, I’d spent a lot of time saying to people, ‘I don’t think he’s an awful person.’ And I don’t necessarily think he is an awful person, but … ” He puts his tattooed hands to his face and gives it a rub. “I’ve seen documents where it’s quite clear he was in a lot of [trouble]. His monthly interest payments on loans he’d taken out were $150,000. I don’t know how he got so stuck into all these nefarious deals.
“The thing is, the numbers aren’t real for those at the top of that world, it’s a feckless level of wealth. The numbers aren’t the same as if we were to experience them. Literally, I don’t think they do the maths. Inigo might have realised that early on. The money is not real and you’re selling something that has no intrinsic value.”
But the money was real to Fine Art Partners (FAP), a Berlin-based finance company run by Daniel Tümpel, an ex-banker, and Loretta Würtenberger,a collector. They became suspicious over a deal they’d done with Philbrick on a Stingel. He had told them Christie’s had “guaranteed” the painting for $9m and sent documents to that effect. But when the painting sold for $5.5m, Tumpel discovered the documents had been “falsified”.
By November, FAP had filed two lawsuits against Philbrick in Miami (where he had his own gallery, opened with seed money from Jopling). But he was already on the run, stopping in Japan, Australia and New Caledonia, before setting up home in Vanuatu.
Whitfield finishes his beer and considers the question: how does he feel, looking back on that life? “I’m not proud of the lies I told as an art dealer, but I think the immoral ambient temperature of that world made it feel perhaps more acceptable, more normalised. When one is being habitually lied to, it becomes easier and at times a survival mechanism – or it did for me.”
Does he think regulation will be introduced as a result of the scandal? He gives me a look, like: don’t be so naive. “In whose interest is it?” He shrugs. “If you are rich, you can do whatever you want. Who is going to change that?” But TV has power, he concedes. Mr Bates changed the way the country saw the Post Office scandal, after all. And his book has been optioned, “by Bad Wolf – Jane Tranter’s company. She was a producer on Succession.”
Like a lot of Philbrick’s friend-victims, all of whom felt they were his confidants, Whitfield is no longer sure what is real and what is not. While he’s often waspish in his observations of people, he folds into woeful self-abasement at the thought of how thoroughly he was duped. Like Jopling, he feels “hurt and betrayed”.
Not long after we meet, news breaks that Philbrick has been released from jail in Pennsylvania into home confinement in Rhode Island where he will serve two years of supervised release. In March, Vanity Fair published The Confessions of Inigo Philbrick, based on emails he sent a journalist from jail. Their correspondence seems to have taken up where Whitfield’s left off. Philbrick told that journalist he had written a TV treatment with Baker-Harber. Schacter, too, is writing his version, and BBC Arts has made a documentary entitled The Real Story of Inigo Philbrick:A Tale of Fortune, Fame and Fraud, due to air later this year.
Philbrick is still trying to spin himself free of responsibility. “I’m 36, still a young man, and a second act is going to require my having been upfront and sincere, but also not a martyr,” he told Vanity Fair. He claimed he would be vindicated and that he planned a return to art dealing. “Of course, I did things the wrong way. But creatively and with the best of intentions. I’ll have to tick the box for the felony. But I believe the art world is sophisticated enough to understand I wasn’t Bernie Madoff (who never made an actual investment).”
At first, Whitfield is sanguine about the prospect of Philbrick getting another chance, saying merely, “I wish him well in his second act.” But once he’s reflected on the implications, I see a flash of rage in him at the way Philbrick continues to find an audience, and at those in the media who collude. It’s the battle he’s been fighting for years: the whole point of the book. “If Inigo were a violent criminal, we wouldn’t even be countenancing this,” he says. “But the ethical soul of this country is so shattered that Inigo and his ilk are seen as merely naughty, rather than people who have ruined lives.”
Two new exhibitions coming to Richmond Art Gallery (RAG) are travelling back in time in search of the meaning of legacies.
Starting April 20, community members can check out Unit Bruises, featuring artworks by Theodore Saskatche Wan and Paul Wong, and The Marble in the Basement, which pays tribute to iconic Canadian artist Joyce Wieland.
Unit Bruises, guest curated by Michael Dang, showcases performance artworks by Wan and Wong from the 1970s addressing societal issues including anti-Asian hate that continue to resonate to this day.
Named after Wong’s 1976 collaborative work with Kenneth Fletcher, 60 Unit; Bruise, where the two documented the ritual of withdrawing Fletcher’s blood and inserting it into Wong’s back via a syringe, the exhibition will also include Wong’s photographic series 7 Day Activity from 1977.
Blood Brother, a companion piece to 60 Unit from 1976 originally thought to be lost and re-edited in 2024, will also be featured.
Wan’s Bound by Everyday Necessities II, where he performed as a patient in a series of medically accurate photographs, will be showcased along rare objects from his archive including original drawings, handwritten notes and photocopies of medical manuals.
Wan is known for his black and white photographs “that straddled the line between instructional medical illustrations and Photoconceptualist interventions.”
Pieces featured in Unit Bruises are on loan from the Vancouver Art Gallery and private collections of Paul Wong Projects and Sophie and Christos Dikeakos. The exhibit, intended for mature audiences, is part of the 2024 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.
The Marble in the Basement, a solo show by Hazel Meyer and curated by Zoë Chan, is a continuation of Meyer’s research project into the legacy of feminist artist and experimental filmmaker Joyce Wieland that began in 2019.
“What gets stored in a shoebox? Deposited into an archive? Shoved into a corner? Catalogued as important?” wrote Meyer.
The gallery will be transformed into a basement in reference to a pile of marble scraps found in Wieland’s basement after her death and feature an installation of sculptures, drawings, video and a textile work.
In addition to the immersive installation, Meyer and her collaborators, including a cute bug-eyed puppet named Marble, will activate artworks and objects on display with three site-specific performances.
Through the project, Meyer explores the questions surrounding artistic value, inheritance, collecting, queer kinship and official histories.
The exhibitions will run from April 20 to June 20 at RAG.