The Art World's Mini-Madoff And Me

For a few years, Inigo Philbrick and I were inseparable. And then it turned out he was running a con. Not that he thinks he did anything wrong. But did I?

- By Kenny 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. Despite sounding like a spinoff of Bed Bath & Beyond, it was backed by the astute and prescient art insider Jay Jopling, who’d founded White Cube gallery and helped give the world the careers of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst—for better or worse. I was immediately smitten, professionally and personally; Philbrick was sharp, fun, and funny.

He was slim, neither short nor tall, with closely cropped gingerish curls and carefully manicured stubble to the point just shy of reaching a fully-fledged beard. He was American but vaguely posh accented, with an English-educated art-museum-curator father, Harry Philbrick, whom he’d followed to Goldsmiths, University of London, as a fine-arts student. The sort of person who fit in seamlessly among the well-educated, well-tailored, well-traveled tribe that populates the art world, even if, unlike so many of them, he didn’t happen to have the inherited funds. Already, however, he had the airy arrogance and profound self-assuredness you find in the smoothest and most convincing of art dealers.