“Every now and then, factual television will throw up a story that takes your breath away,” said Jasper Rees in The Daily Telegraph. BBC2’s “The Great Art Fraud” is just such a documentary. This “riveting” two-parter is about Inigo Philbrick, a “class-A grifter” who swindled art collectors out of millions before being convicted of wire fraud, and sentenced to seven years in a US jail.
An art-world wunderkind, the London-born Philbrick started his career as an intern at Jay Jopling’s White Cube gallery; and by the age of 24 he was running a gallery of his own, bankrolled by Jopling. Handsome and charming, the young American negotiated deals worth millions, and adopted a jet-set lifestyle to match that of his super-rich clients. But when a crucial sale went wrong, said Ben Dowell in The Times, his finances started to unravel. So he turned to fraud, exploiting the lack of regulation in the art market by selling to multiple investors more stakes in artworks than existed.
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It’s an extraordinary story, said Dalya Alberge in The Guardian, which is told in part by Philbrick himself: he was released from jail last year. Expressing more regret than remorse about what he did, he claims not to know what happened to the money he stole – and says he’d like now to start dealing again in art.
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