Nonfiction: ALL THAT GLITTERS: A Tale of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art, by Orlando Whitfield

Reported by Jennifer Szalai

Nobody enjoys being taken for a fool, but a lot of us enjoy stories about confidence artists who do the fooling: fraudsters and scammers who connive their way into fantastic riches — especially if they provide us with the satisfying denouement of a spectacular fall.

In October 2019, when a young art dealer by the suitably theatrical name of Inigo Philbrick was accused of defrauding investors, collectors and lenders of millions of dollars, he fled from Miami to the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. From there, he started sending messages and documents to Orlando Whitfield, an old classmate from art school, who was also, for a brief time, a business partner.

“I had no idea if I might be implicated in the accusations against him,” Whitfield writes in “All That Glitters,” an entertaining memoir of their strange and tortuous friendship. In addition to “friendly concern,” Whitfield, whose bio identifies him as “a failed art dealer,” admits to feeling flattered that a fugitive was sending him Telegram messages from “his desert island refuge.” “It was thrilling,” Whitfield recalls, “like being invited into a secret society.”

It’s a sentiment that could also describe much of their relationship over the years: the smoothly dapper Philbrick initiating an impressionable Whitfield into the mysteries of the contemporary art market. At least, that’s how Whitfield tells it — persuasively, for the most part, even if his impastoed self-portrait as Innocent Naïf is laid on a little thick. Whitfield knows he cannot credibly claim total ignorance of how art markets worked. His father was a managing director of Christie’s, the venerable British auction house; shortly after meeting Philbrick, Whitfield had a summer internship at Christie’s in New York.

Read full report: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/07/books/review/all-that-glitters-orlando-whitfield.html?searchResultPosition=2