Book Review: ‘All That Glitters,’ by Orlando Whitfield

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Book Review: ‘All That Glitters,’ by Orlando Whitfield

Throughout the book, Whitfield keeps telegraphing his “reluctance and anxiety,” even though he took the initiative to open his own gallery with a friend, knowing not to tell Philbrick until the last minute. Soon Whitfield is lying to Philbrick and another party in order to facilitate a six-figure *****.

But it all became too much for Whitfield, who couldn’t stomach the handshake deals and routine deception that left him feeling at sea, lurching from imminent windfall to imminent ruin. In 2018, he was admitted to a psychiatric ward after a nervous breakdown. There, as he struggled through Xanax withdrawal, he met a gray-haired patient who happened to be a “very famous artist.” Listening to Whitfield’s art-world woes, the artist told him — in a line that’s almost too on the nose for

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apparently in the works — “Get out while you still can.”

“All That Glitters” is, in one sense, a story of how an unregulated market works. The canny Philbrick, ever attuned to opportunities and incentives, located the soft spots in the system and pushed on them accordingly. “Some of his actions — now widely decried — are common practice, even encouraged,” Whitfield remarks. What the art market considers “discretion” often amounts to “deliberate obfuscation or outright *****.” But Philbrick eventually admitted in court that he blew past the blurred boundaries of art-market hype and “knowingly engaged” in a fraudulent scheme, at one point selling shares in a painting that amounted to 220 percent of the work — “which is, of course, 120 percent more painting than existed,” Whitfield wryly notes.

Whitfield, for his part, could not bear the froth of an art market that no longer made sense. After leaving the hospital, he apprenticed with a conservator, finding peace and pleasure in handling browning pieces of paper with his bare hands and cleaning away insect ********** with a scalpel. He would leave the financial wizardry to those who relished concocting new ways of “dealing in abstractions of art.”

At last, Whitfield knew what it was that he wanted: “I stood in front of an artwork and just looked.”

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ALL THAT GLITTERS: A Tale of Friendship, ******, and Fine Art | By Orlando Whitfield | Pantheon | 323 pp. | $29

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