All That Glitters - Pre-order

Gabi’s Review

*** Available from 16th October ***

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Orlando Whitfield, the author of this biography, started dealing art with his enigmatic friend Inigo Philbrick while both were students at Goldsmiths University in the UK. Graduating in 2009, they worked as collaborators and associates around the art market for over a decade. Philbrick, whose personal success far eclipsed Whitfield’s, was arrested by the FBI in Vanuatu in 2020 and brought to the USA for trial. He was the pivotal player in one of the biggest art frauds in history, accused of duping art investors of $86m. 

Whitfield writes in a wide-eyed lamb guileless style as he describes his wild and ultimately reluctant association with the uber-charismatic, ruthless Philbrick. Both were highly credentialed young men (Whitfield’s father directed the auction house Christies, while Philbrick was the head of department at a museum in Connecticut). They were thus well placed to trade in the secondary art market, whose speculative assets require entrepreneurship, coupled with intense ambition and a salesman’s opportunism. But Whitfield could never have envisioned the high stakes compromises his partner was prepared to engage with. 

As it unfolds, the story of the decade of their business interactions becomes increasingly astounding: from attempts to prise free Banksy’s work in absurd locations, to shady hotel cash exchanges and vast overvaluations for worthless creations. This exhilarating and always surprising read reveals the unregulated secondary art market as an asset bubble akin to the Wild West, and in which dealings with the world’s mega-wealthy defy belief, involving eye-watering sums of money and a confounding indifference to integrity. You couldn’t gift a more sensational story to the non-fiction lovers in your clan.

Publishers Reviews

'One of the hottest memoirs of 2024' - Sunday Times Style

A Guardian 'Books to look out for in 2024' pick and a Financial Times 'What to Read in 2024' pick.

'An art world Great Gatsby, deliciously withering and dishy.' - Patrick Radden Keefe

'Delicious, sharp and often breathtaking' - Megan Nolan

'A brilliant, devastating expose' - William Boyd

DECEPTION IS A FINE ART.

When Orlando Whitfield first meets Inigo Philbrick, they are students dreaming of dealing art for a living. Their friendship lasts for fifteen years until one day, Inigo - by then the most successful dealer of his generation - disappears, accused of a fraud so gigantic and audacious it rocks the art world to its core.

A sparklingly sharp memoir of greed, ambition and madness, All That Glitters will take you to the heart of the contemporary art world, a place wilder and wealthier than you could ever imagine.