For a few years, Inigo Philbrick and Kenny Schachter were inseparable. Then it turned out Philbrick was running a con. Schachter writes about boozy nights and high-stakes art trades with the art world's mini-Madoff
lnigo Philbrick, left, and the writer, in St. Moritz on New Year’s Eve in 2015. Photo: Courtesy Schachter When I first met Inigo Philbrick in 2012, he was all of 25, looked an awful lot like Justin Timberlake, and was running an art gallery called Modern Collections in London’s Mayfair district.
Friends would accuse me of loving him, and I can’t deny that. Not in a physical way so much, though there was admittedly a lot of horsing around, especially under the influence, which we often were. He’d frequently slip my glasses on when I’d remove them to text. He even grabbed me once following an afternoon consumed by consuming a few bottles and put me into a violent bear hug on a London street corner that I had to struggle my way out of.
Here’s how it worked: Philbrick made his money betting big on a rise in price for a few artists, notably Stingel, who is known for his seemingly endless series of indistinguishable paintings of wallpaper , and Wool, whose most famous text painting fittingly spells out the word FOOL. It worked so well for a while — Stingel’s prices went as high as $10.5 million in May 2017 — that he called himself “Stingeldamus.
The art market was estimated at $64 billion last year. But the value of art in existence is much more. Art is an asset class, but one that offers no dividends or income by hanging on the wall or, as is so often the case, being jammed into Fort Knox–like storage facilities in places like Geneva, designated “free ports” that function as government-sanctioned holding pens where, if the art is never hung on the walls, the owner doesn’t have to pay taxes on it.
You can partly credit, or blame, the election of Donald Trump for this. In a more woke art world, the group of white male artists Philbrick dealt in, after experiencing meteoric rises, began to plateau and tumble. Meanwhile, the prices of some artists of color skyrocketed. Rather than rein his bets in, Philbrick seemed to grow ever more audacious. There is an adage with which my father frequently admonished me as a child: You can lie as much as you like, but don’t believe your own lies.
His easygoing sense of entitlement was partly bluff, partly something he was bred for. He was born in 1987 in Redding, Connecticut, and his father went on to lead the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts museum and currently runs Philadelphia Contemporary. His mother is a writer whom he never went into much detail about. His father was selfish and capricious with money, at least according to him. Philbrick once told me he’d supported his mother and sister financially.
Baker-Harber is a sometime cast member on the U.K. reality-TV show Made in Chelsea, in which wealthy young people are shown being bitchy to each other and everyone around them. In other words, it’s a cliché of obnoxious characters in toxic relationships, all striving for vacuous notoriety. It’s not too far removed from the art world these days.
The bravado of drunken backgammon games, with betting at up to $100,000 each, played with wealthy art speculators and a bevy of prostitutes, was all part of the program. Philbrick’s, anyway. He once spent a weekend playing checkers with a high-end hooker in a rented villa in Antigua and sent me a picture when I expressed my incredulousness at the very thought — who over 8 years old plays checkers?
Then there are Andre Sakhai and Victoria Brooks, a pair of collector-investors who, as I understand it, partnered with and bought works from Philbrick repeatedly, as many of us did.
Another scheme entailed consigning an Ai Weiwei work entitled Map of China to Christie’s in May 2016 with an estimate of $800,000 to $1,200,000 that was then bid up well beyond expectations to $2,142,000, it turns out by a shell company Philbrick controlled. He then secured financing on the full hammer price — it normally takes one to six months to get paid for art sold at auction — from an investor group led by Ethan Vallarino.
Recently, the FBI is said to have taken an interest. In the meantime, he’s been DM-ing me from multiple fake accounts, offering various self-serving explanations for why none of this mess is of his making.
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