The Art Angle Podcast: How an Art-Dealing Prodigy Became the Market’s Most-Wanted Outlaw

by admin

Mar 3, 2020

artnet

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that
delves into the places where the art world meets the real world,
bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew
Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in
museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own
writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top
experts in the field.

A man on the run, millions of dollars missing, major artworks
with multiple claims to ownership: these aren’t plot points in the
latest Hollywood blockbuster, they’re elements of the real-life rise, fall, and disappearance of the
young art dealer Inigo Philbrick.

The son of a lauded museum director and a graduate of the
esteemed Goldsmiths University of London, Philbrick got his start
in the art market as an intern at the world-renowned White Cube
gallery at the tender age of 23. There, under the tutelage of
founder Jay Jopling, he quickly rose through the ranks to lead a
successful in-house private-sales division, before striking out on
his own as a big-money dealer who would go on to boast permanent
spaces in London and Miami, central seats at every major evening
auction (where he was a frequent buyer and third-party guarantor),
and a lavish lifestyle punctuated by private-jet flights around the
world and even a celebrity-socialite
paramour.

In short, Philbrick seemed to be the art market’s golden
child—until in late 2019, the lawsuits against him started
landing fast and furious. Suddenly, the one-time prodigy
stood accused of forging legal documents, refusing to pay enormous
debts, and literal double-dealing of artworks priced in the
millions of dollars each. And rather than stay and defend himself
in court, Philbrick instead vanished into thin air, leaving his
one-time partners and clients to fight over scraps.

Today, reams of legal documents point to his apparent modus
operandi: selling the same partial shares of pieces by in-demand
artists to multiple profit-hungry high-rollers looking for a
quick-yet-juicy return on investment, as well as using art-backed
loans to wring cash out of works whose true ownership may have been
questionable at best. The key to these strategies? A willingness to
exploit the many gray areas within an increasingly financialized
art market, where handshake deals and blind faith still too often
substitute for due diligence and rigorous contracts.

So how did so many members of the art world’s elite become
unwitting co-stars in our industry’s own version of The
Big Short? How high might the losses climb by the time this
sordid saga ends? And where, exactly, has the art market’s
most-wanted man gone? On this week’s episode of the Art Angle,
senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unspools the twisted tale of
Inigo Philbrick, which she reported on in depth for Artnet’s Spring
2020 Intelligence Report.

Listen above and subscribe to the Art Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.)