Towards the Art Market: Inigo Philbrick's Rise and Fall
EDITIONS
Rudolph Stingel, Untitled (Picasso), oil on canvas, 95 x 76 in. (241.3 x 193 cm.), Painted in 2012. Provenance: Gagosian Gallery, New York; V-A-C Foundation, Moscow. Price realised: USD 6,517,500. Christie’s.
“Inigo! Inigo! Inigo! Inigo! Each and every morning, the young art dealer would shout at himself at full volume in the shower to fire himself up for the daily dealing tasks at hand. ”
“[Inigo Philbrick was] The sort of person who fit in seamlessly among the well-educated, well-tailored, well-traveled tribe that populates the art world, even if, unlike so many of them, he didn’t happen to have the inherited funds.”
“we don’t have art movements anymore... we have market movements.”
“The flip is what mattered”
THE trigger for this essay was via artist Walter Robinson's Instagram account, whom I've been following with interest, especially for his ubiquity in the physical New York art scene, and generosity in terms of documenting his flânerie with images, critical commentary and art market numbers. His post on March 16 (amidst the growing concern—in Europe anyway—regarding COVID-19) was a repost from the art dealer (among other things that I will soon explore) Kenny Schachter, who had just written an exposé for New York Magazine on the artworld’s art market from an insider's POV entitled ‘The Art World’s Mini-Madoff and Me Boozy nights and high-stakes art trades with Inigo Philbrick.’ The title didn't really interest me due to the sensational, over-caffeinated and over-cooked tone that New York Magazine is famous for, particularly in its poking articles and reviews of the artworld, no better exemplified by its Pulitzer prize-winning senior art critic, Jerry Saltz.
What led me to research further and ultimately read anything connected or associated with the Inigo Philbrick story was Mr. Robinson's comments under his repost, from the trigger “Ha ha really good,” to the release, “I prefer to characterise the art market as a Big Con, as in 'The Sting,' where a lot of small time players conspire to relieve the malevolent rich of a bit of their cash.” (Walter Robinson, Instagram, comment, March 16, 2020). There was also something about the feature image for the article which shows a middle-aged man (Mr. Schachter I'd learn later) with suit, tie and glass of wine, sitting on the arm of a chair in a tousled hotel room under a spray of light, laughing and looking away from the camera. But Mr. Schachter's portrait is beside the point. It is the young man dressed in a tux sitting with legs crossed in the chair proper, as if a throne, under the shoulder of the guffawing Mr. Schachter that lured me in. He looks directly at the camera, through the person behind the camera, through me, through perhaps you. Head tilted and half-smiling, thinking about something else but very present all the same, like he has the ability to be in two places at once. This is a portrait of a ventriloquist and doll. And, as we will see, we are left with the doll to tell the tale.
Susan Sontag recycled the phrase “trust the tale, not the teller” in her essay 'Against Interpretation'. To recycle the same phrase here gets a little tricky when it comes to Mr. Schachter's 6,000+ words frenzied tale in New York Magazine. The article is both exposé and confessional, implicating a whole cast of art market players and agents (including Mr. Schachter himself) in an artworld of greed hinged on the big gamble that includes Mr. Schachter's family: “I will never forgive myself (or him [Mr. Philbrick]) for permitting one of my sons to join him on an Ibiza jaunt where they had a three-night ecstasy bender. And that wasn’t the only time he fed drugs to my kids, which I found out about only afterward. AT THE SAME TIME [my emphasis], he was very supportive of my making and selling my own art and that of my sons, which likely contributed to my turning a blind eye.” Mr. Schachter's exposé-cum-confessional does one of two things, implicates him and rescues him for coming good when the chips were down. However the chips were crisp coming on burnt before Mr. Schachter came good. An article appeared in ARTnews in December 2019 that “threw him under the bus” for his continued “chummy” support of Mr. Philbrick in his column on Artnet and elsewhere. His motivation to tell-all, and tell-all in this way, does that thing that editors hope an article will do in the mind of the reader, come off balanced. By showing your devil to the world you become the redeemed angel that fell from grace. Some readers of Mr. Schachter's piece will find a balance between man and morality because bigger devils were exposed than him. The American writer David Foster Wallace summed up reader manipulation, especially reportage of this confessional sort, by way of the “asshole problem”, whereby the writer reveals their ignorance and prejudices in a self-effacing way every now and then during the critical reporting to keep the reader on side. However, while David Foster Wallace was doing it for the sake of good sentences, Mr. Schachter's motivations seem less about art and more about something else that includes him, his money, and what he calls his “schtick”.
The two articles that appeared online and in print in the last two weeks double-up on disclosing the historical circumstances that contributed to the rise and fall of art dealer Mr. Philbrick in the secondary art market, “where recently made art is resold”. Now 32, but involved in the London blue-chip gallery circuit since his mid-twenties after graduating from Goldsmiths, and then interning under Jay Jopling of the White Cube, Mr. Philbrick would go from having a prodigal (not the appropriate word although it has been applied by other journalists) reputation when it came to reselling secondary market artworks, players whom they term in the insider art business as a “specullector”, earned from a talent for reselling and ultimately (when “things started to fall apart”) double dealing artworks fetching the princely sums of 10s of millions by artists such as Mike Kelley, Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and in particular Rudolf Stenghal (photorealistic work), Wade Guyton (inkjet canvases), and Christopher Wool (text paintings).
Art dealer, artist, curator and critic (in keeping with the polymorphous job description of the restless and indecisive cultural agent), Mr. Schachter's piece on Vulture online and the New York Magazine in print, is one piece you can get your teeth into, shake and throw into the air to catch again with saliva dripping viciously from your rictus. The article confirms everything you thought the artworld was and more from the voice of an art market agent who is everything you thought and less. It's the “more” of this article that gets you though; a “more” that wouldn't have surfaced only for money was lost, hearts were supposedly broken (in a Tin-Man world) and opportunity knocked: Mr. Schachter, “both compulsively forthcoming and bitter about how things went down with Mr. Philbrick” (NY Times) keeps sharing that he cannot divulge much while divulging that he's going to write a screenplay for a movie, starring, if his description of Mr. Philbrick is anything to go by, “Justin Timberlake” (or a lookalike in keeping with Mr. Schachter's tale of two Mr. Philbrick's).
So, as the ARTnews feature asked: 'Who Is Inigo Philbrick? Meet the Man Behind One of the Biggest Potential Modern Art Scandals' (by Sarah Douglas & Judd Tully, December 3, 2019).
Mr. Philbrick's “patrician” provenance (think Gore Vidal or William Buckley) goes all the way back to seventeenth-century American founders on his father's side, who over a lifetime has headed up and founded a series of art institutions. Dad was also a graduate of Goldsmiths University of London; his son would follow his footsteps in terms of ambition but not direction—his father wanted to be an artist ARTnews reports, whereas his son wanted to be an “art advisor” from a very young age. On reflection Mr. Schachter diagnoses this as “unusual” for a young man, or jokingly anyone. Divorced from his father, Mr. Philbrick's mother is a Harvard-educated writer and teacher in some school of design in Connecticut, where Mr. Philbrick was born and raised. Like The Talented Mr Ripley, a film title that The New York Times riffs on in their entitled 'The Talented Mr. Philbrick,' there's nothing much in any of the articles about Mr. Philbrick's early life, only that he was exposed to art by his father in a very particular way, in its relationship to money, big money. Mr. Schachter divulges that Mr. Philbrick shared a boyhood story of meeting German artist Jörg Immendorff in a fur coat and wanting to be like him when he grew up. A painter in a fur coat rather than paint-spoilt clothes is a very particular image, and a peculiar one to hold on to. Mr. Schachter goes on to analyse retrospectively, like someone desperate to find meaning and regain a bit of themselves after losing out on a once intimate relationship, that Immendorff is not the best role model for a young man, after been arrested in some hotel room with a bevy of prostitutes and ashtray full with cocaine in 2003. Mr. Philbrick would have been 16 years old at the time. However Mr. Schachter's Immendorff anecdote reads like the grafting of speculative reasoning on wounded pride.
All three articles recounting the events of Mr. Philbrick's rise and fall in the secondary art market, where “The flip is what mattered”, partly read like court memoranda detailing a Ponzi-like scheme, where you sell one artwork more than once to get the funds to pay for another. It's a different language, the language of the art market, and one that Mr. Philbrick became fluent in from a young age. Mr. Schachter talks about his and Mr. Philbrick's mutual love for art. But this “love” is always equated with money and the life that that money affords, for both of them, and especially the big gamble of speculation. Mr. Philbrick's language became entrenched in art market numbers and the strangely enigmatic signifier of the autonomous art object, primarily just paint on canvas, becoming gold through some alchemical process that included will and the powers of persuasion among the elite class who, in all these tell-tale narratives of the rich and powerful, are always wanting more, what we dismiss as the 'human condition' when more is what you already have. Mr. Philbrick's love for art was its potential for 'more' after the artist had cleaned his hands of it and Mr. Philbrick's was just starting to get his hands dirty. “Mr. Philbrick’s job wasn’t guiding those artists’ careers or debuting their latest works. Instead, he operated as a reseller, becoming one of a select number of dealers whose companies sold art not just to individual collectors, but also to groups of them” (NY Times). In Mr. Philbrick's scheme, individual and group deals became one and the same thing unbeknownst to his clients, with Mr. Philbrick in the middle with a limited share in the holding because he was doing the flipping and side-winding through a web of transactions and lies that ended in dealers fighting with one another. One artwork in particular was Mr. Philbrick's falling grace—and he was 'graceful' in technique if not morally in, admittedly, a game without morals.
Mr. Schachter dates the moment that things fell apart for his former friend Mr. Philbrick when he hooked up with a British reality TV star after he abandoned another woman with his child and who, it is speculated by Mr. Schachter, a woman who brought stability to his life. ARTnews are ambivalent whether his personal life, which included a baby, a reality TV star, drink, drugs, prostitutes and excessive spending, impeded on his professional life. But all writers agree that one painting among many others, including a Basquiat, secured Mr. Philbrick's fate: Rudolph Stingel's Untitled (Picasso). See Christie's dramatic promotional video above to get a better sense of this photorealistic rendition (or conceptual orchestration not unlike Mr. Philbrick's) of a photograph of Picasso from the 1930s (including specks and scratches inherent in the original photograph). Painted in 2012 when Stingel was in his 50s, as was Picasso in the photograph, Stingel's painting is a photograph-turned-painting-turned-photograph by an artist playing with the conceptual bind of painting disappearing within the historical prompt of photography in a labour of erasement and reflection on painting's and the artist's historical legacy which is left voided here. Mr. Philbrick bought Stingel's Picasso for $6.7 million in 2016; he “spent two years searching unsuccessfully for a buyer willing to pay a considerable premium for the Picasso portrait in a private sale”; in 2019 the hammer-price fell at $5.5 million—according to ARTnews Mr. Philbrick promised $14 million. “It turned out there were three parties expecting payment, one professing to own the entire painting, the other two sharing it by half. It appeared Mr. Philbrick had double-sold the work.”
Remember the rise and fall of Mr. Philbrick is set against the backdrop of a booming art market. According to Mr. Schachter “The art market was estimated at $64 billion last year [2019].” Timing was everything, not just in the day-to-day dealing of artworks with multiple guarantors, but against a rising art market of a select group of artists that Mr. Philbrick was committed to “driving up [their] markets, often establishing new benchmarks (ARTnews)”. It seems that once the artwork leaves the artist's studio the artist has no real control of its reading or market, especially new work resold on the secondary art market. Artists have tried to control their market value. American artist Wade Guyton, known for his highly marketable inkjet canvases, and one artist Mr. Philbrick was committed during his rise, tried to control the market for his work around 2014, suggesting on Instagram “he was creating a whole series of works from the previously unique printing of an image file”. Or closer to home, Sean Scully, who holds on to or even buys back his paintings from collectors to suppress supply and up demand and price, was motivated to control the market after being stung by art collector Charles Saatchi who offloaded 11 paintings by Scully from his collection in the late 1980s, severely damaging the market price for his work.
There are no victims here among the players and institutions of this story. Mr. Schachter lost $1.7 million, but is planning to “mint money” from a screenplay. Gamblers are never the victims, just the people around them. There is anger here in the adolescent pejorative name-calling and metaphor that is perpetuated in all three articles, especially the New York Times, where the writer resorts to this (funny and easy to smile at as it is): “Mr. Schachter wore a blue mountain vest, Adidas track pants and sneakers with fire engine red laces. He looked like the fourth member of the Beastie Boys, and was greeted by gallery owners and artists like royalty.” In some ways it fits the portrait that Mr. Schachter's gives of himself through his language usage in New York Magazine, describing Mr. Philbrick as “Justin Timberlake” on first meeting him; having “balls of steel” in the auction houses, and being “art-world wingmen”; and on discovering the dupe Mr. Philbrick becomes “David Blaine”. There is also something pathetic about this: “We took trips together: New Year’s in St. Moritz, summers in Spain (not Ibiza; he was too busy, he told me, when he was with the ‘clients’ he never wanted me to interact with).” In the writing, there's a sense that Mr. Schachter has just awakened the morning after a hard night's drinking the night before and is slowly putting things together. Mr. Schachter talks about “love”, about being accused of loving the boy, admitting that there was tenderness and horse play in their physical interactions.
The institutions that set the stage and rules and wagers for these players to play the game still stand after the pawns have fallen to be replaced by more pawns and so it goes. The victims of these enterprises of power are exterior to the institutions and consensual pawns that field and play them: the families, the children become bi-products of the exposure, bred for future Inigo Philbrick's, whom I will leave the last words to:
“There is going to be a lot more to this than has come out yet. The story is going to be a cautionary one with regards to the professionalization, securitization and legalization of the art world. We are in a period of massive transition where art dealers, collectors, and investors are attempting to turn the arena into one which mimics the worlds of finance and real estate. Alongside this change will naturally come impropriety and the need for increased due caution.”
Inigo Philbrick being arrested & deported from the Oceania country of Vanatu in June 2020.