Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to a special edition of Off The Fence. Today, we’re delighted to be carrying an excerpt from the book of the year: Orlando Whitfield’s art world memoir, All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud and Fine Art, which has been released to lavish praise from the Guardian, the Telegraph, theFinancial Times; with Patrick Raden Keefe calling it ‘deliciously withering and dishy’ and William Boyd celebrating it as ‘a brilliant, devastating exposé’.
The ruthless and glamourous figure of Inigo Philbrick has been discussed in this mail-out at some length before. For 15 years, he was Orlando Whitfield’s occasional business partner and best friend. In this chapter, we join the action in a Mayfair hotel bar, where Orlando is trying to convince Inigo to join him on a deal.
There is a rootlessness to the very wealthy in the twenty-first century, a floating ease in both place and time that is mirrored, or perhaps emboldened, by a certain kind of space. Oases devoid of responsibility or obligation allow one an escape from reality that is almost womb-like in its comfort. In the Connaught Bar, if you can bag a table (it was named ‘Best Bar in the World’ by a panel of 500 so-called experts in 2020, the year in which, as I recall it, everyone had to stay home in order to get a load on), you will be surrounded by an international array of players united by one thing only: money.
As you walk in you will be greeted by a server in a school uniform grey dress, black-patent-leather-belted primly at the waist. You’ll note the way piped music seeps into the room like an odourless gas, and the way the lighting, which manages somehow to maintain a crime scene lustre whatever the weather outside, pools between the tables and chairs and glances off the glass table tops and brass fittings and the painted silver panelling. Think air travel in the 1960s with a touch of netherworld glamour. You’ve seen it in a movie. Have you got a reservation? We’re rather full tonight.
The guests are ensconced in cashmere and softly shrugging leather; crisp, dark denim in stark juxtaposition to the falsetto glint of diamonds and the low energy glow of rose gold. Their torpor is somehow moribund, borne of the ennui that will always affect those for whom any kind of satisfaction is gratuitously imminent. The room shimmers non-dom status – the financial equivalent of diplomatic immunity – and they talk of elsewhere, always elsewhere, as if the present moment were fraught with some kind of difficulty.
None of this matters to Inigo, who saunters in a full 20 minutes after we are meant to meet, though ten after I’ve arrived – in this game, with these guys, you adapt to habitual tardiness – and mouthily whispers ‘Sorry, playboy, just a minute more’ as he continues his phone conversation with whatever hapless intermediary is doing his bidding this time. ‘Just tell him to calm down. We’re all going to make a lot of money on this one. My guy’s got the condition report now – finally.’ Shift the blame, stall, whatever works. ‘Shouldn’t be long now, then we can all get paid. Hey, listen, I have a call on the other line, I need to take this.’
He puts his phone face down on the table between us and then thinks better of it and turns it over. Notifications roll inlike the wheel on a Vegas slot machine. His hair is wild and his tan sandy and beaming. I feel the contrast to my winter London pallor. As always, he is expensively fragrant. He’s been in Australia for Christmas and is riding the jet lag wave, so he tells me, ready to rage all through my night, his day. At the Connaught Bar, the rough comes with a side helping of smooth.
‘I’m starved,’ he says, sitting down heavily next to me and pouring himself a glass of sparkling water. ‘The food on Qantas is just fucking dire. Everything tastes like kangaroo shit. Let’s get some snacks.’
A waitress comes over as if by magic and greets us with a ‘Good evening, Mr Philbrick’.
Without looking up, Inigo reads from the menu: ‘We’d have the truffle croque madam [£45] but hold the fries, the crispy sushi salmon sashimi, the shrimp satay and the Ibérico ham [three plates for £42] and a bottle of the Dom Perignon – the ’08 [£295]. And another bottle of water – in fact, just keep the water coming. That should do us for now.’ He flashes a smile at the waitress, who flashes one back. Inigo unbuttons his jacket and leans back with a sigh, glances with an eye-roll at the messages flooding in on his phone and says simply, as if it were a statement of unequivocal fact: ‘Funny world, my friend. Funny fucking world.’
‘How do you mean?’ I ask. I agree, how could I not, but I’m not sure if we’re on the same page as to why.
‘Us, dude. This!’ He casts an eye over the room and raises his arm as if he’s conjured it all and could whisk it away in an instant. ‘Madness.’ Just as I am about to agree, his phone starts to ring and the Champagne arrives and he’s gone, back into deal mode.
‘I spoke to him just now, he’s panicking but I told him we have the condition report so we should be able to invoice soon.Huge invoice. It’ll block out the sun in his inbox.’ This kind of big money banter continues for a while and I zone out slightly. It’s intended to dazzle, I guess, make you think about the destination, not the journey, the turbulence. I sip my Champagne which, despite my knowing that it’s a) vintage and should taste amazing and b) incredibly expensive and should taste amazing, merely tastes how all Champagne tastes to me: coppery and cold and fizzy with the lingering aftertaste of sweet vomit. I wash it all away with the ham, the nutty fat coating the inside of my mouth as I ponder how to pitch Inigo on the Christopher Wool I’m not meant to show him, let alone sell to him, and which feels like it’s making my phone warm – actually hot – in my pocket.
£400 pounds’ worth of snacks and fizz are dealt with in under half an hour, although Inigo has been on the phone or texting or on Instagram exchanging memes with a client or a would-be client more or less the whole time, so I haven’t been able to find a moment to show him the Wool. Inigo pays the bill and gives crisp £20 pound notes to everyone we’ve been in contact with since we arrived and then we bundle ourselves back into our coats and, already warmed by the Champagne and the bonhomie, step out into the velveteen frostiness of a London January evening.
The cold bites at our faces grinning with booze, but we haven’t far to walk; Inigo seldom leaves Mayfair, unless, that is, he’s leaving via an airport. We walk into Cipriani – the Italian restaurant he jokingly-but-not-so-jokingly calls ‘the canteen’ because it’s opposite his gallery and he eats there almost every day – where he is greeted like a son returned from war. Inigo hugs the maitre d’ and hands his coat, a soft blue thing with an astrakhan collar that engulfs his neck like a headlock, to the Russian coat check girl and she flutters her lashes so hard they seem to blur. I give over the jacket I have worn to cycle into town, still slightly damp from my efforts, and receive in return a pitying grimace. I agree: the reflective patches aren’t very Mayfair.
The room is decked out like the interior of a ship, though less the cruise-y kind that pensioners die on and more the kind that Billy Zane wears white tie on. Polished teak and brass portholes that look on to nothing and blue and white nautical linens and sturdy, short-stemmed ship’s wineglasses: this is not a room for the mere Haves, this is a room for the Have Yachts. ‘The food here is just like your Italian grandmother would make,’ he tells me as we sit down, ‘if your Italian grandmother were a really bad cook and charged you a lot of money.’ I couldn’t care less: there is a dessert trolley.
Inigo takes the menu in hand and looks it over imperiously. Two gin gimlets have arrived and I already feel my buzz. He orders for me, something he enjoys doing for everyone he dines with – or more accurately, buys dinner for (Inigo is always buying). I feel suddenly like a housewife from the 1950s and the burnished edge of my boozy confidence is dulled ever so slightly. Is this the point? Is it a tactic on his part? Generosity as a form of power?
I can feel the distinct lack of messages coming into my phone in my pocket as Inigo’s continues to vibrate and glow next to his cocktail. I know only that on mine there is a collection of pixels that could make or break my gallery. Pasta dishes arrive one after another and ruby discs of beef carpaccio and vitello tonnato the colour of American tan tights all jostle for position on our round table. Inigo texts with one hand and holds his fork in the other. I’m thankful, briefly, for Inigo’s distraction as I try to soak up the alcohol sloshing around in my system, as I try to neutralise the insulin spike in my blood.
Eventually I feel better. Inigo has put down his phone to talk to the maitre d’, a lurching Italian man in a white dinner jacket who’s come over to make a joke about something Inigo had texted him while we’d been in the restaurant. When he’s eventually sauntered away, I seize the moment.
‘You still in the Wool market?’ I blurt, failing to channel my inner Gordon Gecko.
‘Always,’ he replies.
I think I can detect a glimmer of surprise at my question, but Inigo puts a forkful of rigatoni into his mouth and waits for me to continue. Your move, playboy.
I take my phone out of my pocket and delete an alert telling me I have a text from my mother. Then I quickly put the phone on airplane mode, a trick Inigo had taught me by proxy: you don’t want your clients seeing a stray text pop up when they’re looking at a picture on your phone. I find the image and drop the phone on the table with what I hope seems like nonchalance, as if selling Christopher Wool paintings is something I now do all the time at dinners in yacht-themed restaurants.
The phone skitters over the starched tablecloth and knocks over a glass of water. Wryly amused, Inigo wipes the corners of his mouth with his napkin and then uses it to dab the water from the phone’s screen.
He looks at the image for no more than five seconds, zooming in on one corner with a quizzical expression. The Wool, Untitled (D305) from 2006, exudes a frantic delicacy, the handiwork of a haphazard genius. The printed surface of the paper has the punky aesthetic of a ’zine comprised entirely of torn-up Rorschach tests. Anger and confusion are enmeshed in a sombre monotone web splotched with great greasy splats of pigment. This is if you view it in person. On my iPhone’s damp screen, however, the Wool looks far from impressive – but that is hardly important to Inigo at this moment; the collection of backlit pixels don’t actually represent the Wool qua artwork, they represent its fungible monetary value. What we’re looking at is a sales document, a trade to be executed, not an aesthetic experience. This is business, not art.
‘Nice. You direct [directly in touch with the owner]?’
‘Yes. Client is in LA.’ Double lie: I’m only in touch with Hugo who is either in west London or the West Country. The painting is apparently in Switzerland, though I’ve no idea where the owner lives or who she is (or even if the client is a she), but LA sounds impressive and Inigo knows I’ve been there recently seeing an altogether different client – a man to whom we together tried and failed to sell a painting on the eve of the 2016 presidential election, figuring that an ebullient mood the morning after would make the sale a shoo-in.
‘What you asking?’
‘Six.’ Inigo basically only ever trades in US dollars, so there was no need to burden this snappy financial repartee and the hundreds of thousands aren’t even worth mentioning.
What do you think this is? Retail? My net to Hugo was $450,000. Still room to play.
‘Hm. I could do 450.’
‘500?’
‘Okay, done,’ he tells me, passing me back my phone and motioning to a loitering waiter. The whole thing is over in less than half a minute. ‘My friend here would like to see the dessert trolley, please.’ And then, turning to me, ‘They have the most insane ice cream, too. It’s like the stuff you had when you were a kid but for about ten pounds a scoop. I guess the price somehow justifies eating kids’ food. There’s chocolate sauce and they bring you sprinkles. What a fucking world.’
The ice cream comes, great frothing heaps of it that look like torn-off clouds, and we pour over the hot chocolate sauce from a silver jug with its handle wrapped in a napkin tied in a bow. The ice cream collapses with a fatty sigh and we dig in. ‘Oh, one thing,’ says Inigo just as I shovel in a large spoonful. ‘This deal doesn’t involve Hugo, does it?’
Through my mouthful of ice cream, I lie.
All That Glitters is available in all good bookstores and also online here. We strongly recommend you buy a copy.
We’ll be back next week with a standard Tuesletter. Have a lovely weekend.
All the best,
TF