The art market is a good example of the conspicuous consumption theorized by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of the Leisure Class, and two recent texts by outsiders document the extremes of ostentation, fraud, and opacity reached in our time. Orlando Whitfield, trained in the London art school Goldsmiths, describes himself as a failed dealer and personally lived through the rise and fall of his friend and boss Inigo Philbrik, sentenced to seven years in prison after leading the biggest art scam of American history. Bianca Bosker, in turn, is a New York journalist who infiltrated into contemporary art circles by working in galleries, in a painter’s studio, and in the Guggenheim as a guard, all to be able to describe in anthropological spirit a universe of little transparency, off limits to the public at large.
Culture and commerce intertwine in a market that moves some 65 billion dollars but is totally unregulated, because practices which are illegal in the stock market – such as the use of inside information or the manipulation of prices – are frequent in an environment where leads are whispered and where artists and galleries maneuver in secret to protect the value of their pieces. Since the 1990s, money flowing from the former Soviet Union, the dot-com bubble, and the huge profits reaped by the banking sector have together multiplied art prices, producing the phenomenon of what some call ‘speculism’ (speculation+collectionism), given that artworks have taken on the nature of financial assets. So it is that programs like Yale’s Master of Fine Arts do not offer drawing classes, but include training in cryptocurrency. Both Whitfield and Bosker give a fascinating portrait of excesses and deceptions, but this does not prevent the former from combining his devastating exposé with the religious experience of contemplating an installation by Sol LeWitt, nor the latter from mixing curious skepticism with dazzled attraction to the “demons of art” that taught her to appreciate Mapplethorpe’s photography, Brancusi’s sculpture, or Bacon’s triptychs.
All That Glitters documents a market in which, indeed, not all that glitters is gold, and describes its deceits and swindles, from an initiatory trip to Lisbon with a Paula Rego painting as carry-on to avoid taxes to his falsification of a Félix González-Torres, recounting too the large-scale frauds of the friend who would end up behind bars, whose confidences he betrays to present a vivid sad fresco that has been called ‘a great Gatsby of the world of art.’
Get the Picture is a friendlier book, well written and entertaining, which takes a candid look at the carousel of galleries, fairs, and parties of contemporary art; a gaze attentive to the peculiarities of its language, intrigued by the passion of artists struggling on the edges of the market, and willing to immerse herself in that atmosphere. Between Brooklyn and Chelsea, and from Miami to the Micronesia where Philbrik was arrested, these travels trace an abrasive and cordial picture of an absurd and brilliant, hungry and opulent galaxy.