Inside One of Art Grifter Inigo Philbrick’s Formative Schemes

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To be a good art dealer you need to be both prescient and manipulative. The mere ability to spot a trend or an artist is not enough. You have to know how to get what you want from the situation, to buy early and hold your nerve. That I never had this instinct can be evidenced by the fact that when I went to the British street artist Banksy’s Christmas pop-up, Santa’s Ghetto, in December 2004, I bought two prints for about £100 each. I took them home and stuck one on my wall with drawing pins in the full glare of a south-facing window; the other I promptly lost to the murky gods of the underbed. Today, in good condition, those prints would be worth upwards of £150,000. Each.

When I told Inigo this story he almost fell off his chair laughing. Banksy has aways occupied an odd place in the contemporary market, a nether region of mutual disdain and avarice. Back then, Banksy still existed mostly in the world of street art and tabloid speculation about his identity. His work peppered the walls of east London and he showed at the gaudy Lazarides Gallery in Soho. The art world at the time cared little for Banksy and I suspect the feeling was mutual. Inigo, however, sensed opportunity.

The art market boom that had started with the YBAs in the 1990s was driven by four main factors: an influx of money from the former Soviet Union and then, later, the first dot com boom; the public relations know-how of dealers like Jay Jopling; and the opportunism of collectors like Charles Saatchi. Many of the new players in the market made their first purchases through the auction houses. Christie’s, Sotheby’s—and to a lesser extent Bonhams and Phillips—are globally recognized luxury brand names and many new collectors, wary of being ripped off by unknown galleries or sharky dealers, chose to begin their collecting through the auction houses, with their veneer of international trustworthiness. Banksy, and other street artists like Kaws and Mr. Brainwash, with their easy visual punchlines and uncomplicated politics, were a perfect gateway drug for a new generation of wealthy potential art buyers. Auction houses will hold entry-level sales (Sotheby’s jingoistic, cashing-in-on-Brexit-sentiment sale, “Made in Britain,” for example) to lure in new clients with Banksy prints and the like, only later to persuade them that they need to get a little more serious about their collecting (i.e. spend more). Once those auction guys get their teeth into you, they’d sooner leave their dentures in your leg than set you free.

One afternoon in the autumn of 2007 Inigo emailed me an image of a pair of metal doors. The email contained no text but the subject line read “Call me when you’ve seen this.” At first I was confused. The doors looked ordinary, grubby; I could see litter strewn about on the pavement to either side. The photo was blurry but when I zoomed in I noticed at the bottom of the door on the left what appeared to be a Banksy rat wearing a baseball cap and holding a beatbox on its shoulder. I called Inigo immediately.

“That’s quite a find,” I said. “How did you come across that?”

“Walking home from Hoxton Square. I got stuck on the phone so I went round the block a few times.” (This compulsive habit of walking while he was on the phone would stick with Inigo for as long as I knew him. Now, when I remember him pacing back and forth in the gallery at Mount Street with his phone glued to his ear, it seems to me an eerie prognostic of him in some prison exercise yard.)

“It’s great,” I said. “The doors are filthy but the rat itself looks in good condition.”

“I’ve already sent it to a guy I know at Phillips,” he told me. “What are you doing now?”

“Nothing special.”

“Want to come and meet me here? Maybe we can find out more.”

When I arrived about half an hour later it was dark and raining. I found Inigo sitting on a low wall, huddled under an umbrella and glued to his BlackBerry. As I approached him, he started talking without looking up. “I’ve found the owner on the Land Registry,” he said flatly, “but I don’t think that’s the way to do this. Really what we want to do is find whoever’s in charge of the building—the super, I guess. Is that what you call them here?” (The only “super” I’d ever seen was that rotund fellow on Friends so I kept quiet.) “Anyway, we find the guy and offer to replace the doors and bang him some cash. Say five grand for the door and ten for the super? We want him to feel incentivized.”

“Where are we going to get £15,000 from?” Whatever our dubious early promise as art dealers, our bona fides as spenders were well established; all the proceeds from both Rego deals were gone. “We’ll figure all that out,” said Inigo dismissively. “The important thing is to get in with our offer quickly and keep the building guy quiet. We don’t want him finding out what it could be worth.”

“How much do you think it’s worth?”

“I won’t know until we hear back from my guy at Phillips, but I would guess upwards of £50k.”

“You’re kidding?!”

“No, sir. People go crazy for this shit. No idea why. I assume it’s a bubble.”

We walked back together in the rain, Inigo still glued to his phone, attempting to look up Banksy prices on Artnet. He muttered under his breath as he toggled the parameters for his search.

The next morning Inigo called me early. “My guy from Phillips emailed me overnight.” His tone was breathy, rushed. “They’ll take the piece. They want the Banksy. And, dude, the estimate…”

“Don’t leave me hanging.”

“Eighty to ninety thousand pounds fucking sterling! This could really set us up, big boy.”

“Christ! What’s our next move?” I asked, trying to convey unfelt enthusiasm. The whole idea seemed to me an odd mix of fantastical and simple. Buy a door, bribe a building manager? How hard could that be? But where do you start? A fucking door shop? How do you approach the building manager? And how would we raise the money? In Inigo’s mind, the deal was halfway done; in mine it was dead on arrival.

“Are you up? Let’s go and see if we can find the building guy,” Inigo said.

“Give me half an hour.”

It had rained all night but the sun shone that morning and everything looked as if it had been hosed down for a film shoot or a visiting dignitary. Inigo was outside my door drinking an espresso from a paper cup when I came out. Whereas it never occurred to me to wear sunglasses except on holiday, Inigo would put his on at the slightest ray, and that day he wore his father’s enormous old leather car coat, too. With the collar turned up and his free hand stuffed down in a pocket, he looked like he was going to an audition for a private detective role, with me his squinty sidekick.

“So I think you should do the talking,” Inigo said as the building came into view a little while later. “If he’s English he’ll hate Americans. Frankly, wherever he’s from, if he’s ended up here, he’ll probably hate Americans.”

“I’m not sure a Brit named Orlando is going to do much better, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Our names are ridiculously impractical,” Inigo sighed.

It was still early on a Saturday and the building, which housed offices and design studios, was quiet. Through the plate glass windows we could see a cleaner at work and a security guard dozing off, his hand holding his cheek like a clam in its shell. He shuddered awake as I pushed at the locked glass doors. I smiled broadly. He levered himself out of his chair, all six foot six of him.

Opening the door a crack he looked down at me and said, “Hello?”

“Hi,” I replied cheerily. “Are you…”—I hadn’t thought through what I was going to say—”…the super?” He looked confused. “The building manager?” His expression morphed to one of decision-making.

“Yes.” And then after some consideration he said, “Sometimes.” That was good enough for me.

“We’re interested in your doors.” He opened the glass door further and looked at it as if seeing it for the first time. With the sleeve of his jacket he polished away some greasy hand prints and a mark that looked like it might have been left by some- one’s forehead. “Ah, no,” I said quickly, “not these doors. The ones around the back. The metal ones.”

“Show me,” he said, opening the door fully and locking it behind him from the street before giving a five-minute hand gesture to the cleaner.

We walked around to the back of the building, Inigo keeping a few paces behind us, failing to suppress a grin. When we reached the doors I froze. The man looked at them and then back at me. “So what do you want? Is there something wrong?” he asked.

“We collect street art,” I told him grandiloquently. “We want to buy the doors for that rat.” He looked at me like I had suddenly broken into song.

Inigo stepped forward and interjected. “We’d like to buy these doors. We’re happy to pay for them to be replaced. And we’d be happy to give you some cash if you could help us make this happen.” The man stared at Inigo and then back at me before he crouched down in front of the door and inspected the Banksy rat.

“You really want this?” he asked, looking up at us both. “I’ll have to talk to the building manager,” he said.

“I thought you were the building manager?” I said.

“I’m just the night manager. Sometimes cover for the main man when he’s away. But stuff like this,” he said, pointing to the rat, “has to go through him. Must be worth something to you, all this effort…” he trailed off.

“Do you have his contact details?” Inigo asked.

“Can’t go around giving people’s numbers out just like that,” he said, standing up. “You’ll have to come back on Monday.”

“And there’s no possibility we could just do this through you without involving your boss?” I asked.

“He’s not my boss. Did I say he was my boss?”

“We would certainly want to pay you for your help and your time,” Inigo said smoothly. “Is there a number that would make you reconsider? How much would a new set of doors cost, for example? We’d be happy to pay you the same amount in cash for your help. Double, even?”

“Like I said, you’ll have to talk to Steve on Monday.”

“Could we leave you our contact details?” Inigo stretched out a hand with his card.

“I’ll pass it on,” he said, sneering at the card in his massive palm.

“Well, it was never going to be easy,” I said to Inigo in an attempt to break the mutual silence as we walked away from the building.

“We’ve got to somehow do this without alerting them to what they have.”

“Maybe if we damaged the other door somehow they’d have to replace them both and we could buy them as scrap. Do we know anyone who could accidentally on purpose reverse into it?”

“Not a terrible idea,” Inigo replied, “but too risky. Plus the only person we know in London with a car is your mother and I wouldn’t trust her accuracy in reverse! Let’s see what Steve says on Monday. I’m going to have breakfast with Robert. Want to join?”

The following Monday I went to Goldsmiths to attend lectures as usual while Inigo said he had a meeting at White Cube. Despite his consistently high grades, Inigo’s attendance at Goldsmiths was, at best, minimalist. Towards the end of the afternoon, he called me to say that he’d not heard from Steve but that he was going to walk by the building on his way home. I wasn’t surprised at Steve’s silence; I imagined that the surly night manager had thrown away Inigo’s card the moment we were out of sight.

Half an hour later, Inigo called me in the middle of a lecture on the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. When I called him back at the end of the lecture the phone barely rang before he picked up. “They fucked us!” he yelled. “The fuckers. They fucking fucked us, dude. The door. It’s fucking gone. I went past just now and there are some guys finishing off putting in the new doors.”

“Did you speak to them? What happened? Was this Steve guy there?”

“They don’t know anything. They’d just been called this morning to replace the doors. They said that one of the doors was gone when they got there. It was already boarded up.” Moments after this call I received a photo from Inigo. It showed two workmen fitting the new doors. Beside them, leaning against the wall, was a door-sized sheet of plywood. It was already riddled with graffiti.

As I made my way home on the bus that evening, I felt utterly deflated. It had been a long while since the [Paula] Rego deals and I felt sure that Inigo would soon lose interest in I & O Fine Art and in turn in our friendship. I was coming to see that he was a strange mix of fierce determination and an easy-come-easy-go attitude. It wasn’t until years later that I realised that this was the perfect way for an art dealer to be. So many potential sales come to nothing—after all, you’re selling something that no one needs—hat disappointment is an inevitable aspect of the job. You have to chase every deal with the same intensity, and when nine out of ten just don’t work out, you have to brush yourself off, forget all the effort and expense, forget the late nights spent with people you’d happily watch drown, and wake up the next day ready to push hard all over again. I took defeats too personally—I still do—and setbacks stick in my skin like thorns; for Inigo, they seemed only to spur him on.

Excerpted from ALL THAT GLITTERS by Orlando Whitfield. Copyright © 2024 by Orlando Whitfield. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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