Stuff I’ve Been Reading: Winter 2024

Books read:

• All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art—Orlando Whitfield
• All the Beauty in the World:
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me—Patrick Bringley
• Other books to be discussed at a later date

Books bought:

• All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art—Orlando Whitfield
• All the Beauty in the World:
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me—Patrick Bringley
• The Ladies’ Paradise—Émile Zola
• Headshot—Rita Bullwinkel
• The Spinning House: How Cambridge University Locked Up Women in Its Private Prison—Caroline Biggs
• All I Ever Wanted: A Rock ’n’ Roll Memoir—Kathy Valentine

I am very worried that I am about to fogey-ize myself. It was bound to happen eventually, I guess. I have been amazingly cool for a long time, as you of all people, dear Believer readers, can testify, but one of the two books I have recently read about art has pushed me over the edge into disapproving old age, and I doubt there’s any coming back. The two books are Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World and Orlando Whitfield’s All That Glitters. The former is about the art collected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the latter is about the contemporary art market. So two books about art that begin with the word all, but only one contains the word beauty; the other is a shorthand warning about money. All the Beauty in the World is, yes, beautiful, but also wise and sad; All That Glitters made me feel a bit sick.

It’s not Orlando Whitfield’s fault; not really. His book is compelling, with a real villain, an art dealer called Inigo Philbrick, at its center, and you may recall the name. Philbrick was arrested in 2020 for fraud and jailed for seven years. He was released in early 2024, after serving four of them. All That Glitters is the story of Whitfield’s relationship with Philbrick, from the time they studied together at Goldsmiths in London until the time of Philbrick’s disappearance, when it all got to be too much for him—he had told too many lies, promised too many things to too many people, owed too much money. And yet all his crimes seem to be a quite straightforward consequence of the way the contemporary art market operates: borderline criminality is baked in.

Here is how Philbrick and Whitfield operated. Walking home one evening, Philbrick spots what is now known to everyone as “a Banksy,” a piece of street art on a pair of metal doors. It depicts a rat wearing a baseball cap and carrying a beatbox. He sends a photo to Whitfield, who joins him at the site, and they plan what to do—because, of course, something has to be done. You can’t just leave it there for the enjoyment or indifference of passing foot traffic. The next morning, Philbrick hears back from a London auction house, and his contact there tells him that the auction house would pay eighty grand for it. This is right at the beginning, before the beginning, even, of our protagonists’ careers as gallerists in the art world. They are both still students.

If Banksy’s rat belongs to anyone, apart from the public, then it belongs to the owners of the building, so Philbrick suggests they bung the building manager fifteen grand and pay to replace the doors. They don’t have the fifteen grand, of course, but that doesn’t seem to matter. A conversation with the night manager is unsatisfactory. They show him what they are interested in doing, but he won’t let them speak to his boss. And before they know it, the Banksy is gone and the doors are being replaced. Philbrick calls Whitfield. “They fucked us! The fuckers. They fucking fucked us, dude. The door. It’s fucking gone.” I am not sure that Philbrick and Whitfield were fucking fucked, really. The thing they wanted to steal was stolen by someone else, is all.

But this is a world full of thieves, chancers, con artists. An artist called Adam installs a glass divider in their gallery—that is his entire show. (“A previous show of his, in New York, consisted of a woman he hired from Craigslist to travel to the vicinity of the gallery twice a week. No one but the woman knew when or if she would be there.”) When the billionaire collector Marc Steinberg sent his business manager to do an audit of the art fund Philbrick ran for him, Philbrick had to reproduce one of the works of art, because he’d sold the original, and the money had been “transferred out of the fund.” Luckily, the artwork in question was a bunch of rubber welcome mats, so Philbrick sourced a hundred of the same ones from a hardware store and re-created the piece. He got away with it. The business manager “had no idea what the fuck he was looking at,” Philbrick said, chortling, but one has sympathy for the guy. Who can tell, really, which rubber welcome mats are phony and which are real?

Did you know it was possible to own only a percentage of an artwork? I was naive enough to believe that if you purchased something, it was yours, but the rich don’t do things like that. They are interested only in the value of a thing, not in the thing itself. (And the value of most contemporary art is created and then inflated entirely by the important art dealers. Did you ever have the dream that a piece of art by a young artist you bought would, over the course of time, become worth a lot more than you paid for it? Well, it won’t. Not unless Jay Jopling, founder of the uber-influential gallery White Cube, or Larry Gagosian, says so.)

Sometimes you can own 50 percent of a piece, or more, or less. Does that mean you have to hand it over every few months to its co-owner, so they can put it on their wall? No, of course not. They are not interested in displaying the art, just as they are not interested in displaying their hedge funds, so it sits around in a climate-controlled customs warehouse. One of Philbrick’s crimes was to sell more than 100 percent of an artwork. On at least one occasion, co-owners thought their painting was in their warehouse. It is amazing how important the “post-conceptual” artist Christopher Wool—whose works are worth several million—is to their schemes. Wool’s work often consists of large words on a canvas. HYPOCRITE. AUTHORITY. PRANKSTER. They do not, to my mind, reveal their meanings slowly.

The book describes the fever-inducing relationship between Philbrick and Whitfield, from college to prison. Whitfield is clearly not cut out for the task of lying to and stealing from the superrich. He’s too thoughtful, and his mental health suffers, and he ends up in a hospital with a Xanax addiction. But for a long time there was a part of him that wanted to be Philbrick, whose unaffordable lifestyle (private jets, clubs, villas, Miami galleries) is of no interest to us here at Believer Towers, right? Whitfield pulls himself out of it eventually, and now works in a world that is in every way the opposite of the bizarre universe of White Cube: he helps restore works of art, painstakingly and with love. “Why did you do this?” the federal judge asked Philbrick at his trial. “‘For money, Your Honour,’ Inigo replied.’ ‘That simple?’ ‘That simple.’” Depressingly, this is an answer that a great many people in this book, dealers and artists, would give, if they were honest.

I read All the Beauty in the World not long after finishing All That Glitters, and though the comparison is unfair to Whitfield, whose book really is worth reading, I feel like I’m being asked to choose whether to attend Trump University or the Sorbonne. Patrick Bringley was a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and his book is about his job, and why he took it, and what he thought while he was there, and it’s beautiful.

Bringley wasn’t always a security guard. Before he worked at the Met, he worked at The New Yorker. He was set for a conventional smart-white-boy career. But then his older brother, Tom, died at the age of twenty-six, of cancer, and he no longer had the stomach for it. Every single chapter of this book contains something illuminating about art history, or people, or the lives of others, but the third chapter, titled “A Pietà,” is as lovely and sad a piece of writing as I have read this year. Tom is dead, and while visiting relatives, Patrick and his mother sneak away to visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They split up, and when Patrick finds her again, she is looking at a picture by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, a fourteenth-century Florentine:

Against a featureless gold background, it depicted a young man who was very beautiful but bluntly dead, supported bodily by his mother, who hugged her son as she would if he were living—a scene that is called a Lamentation or Pietà. My mother has always been a good one to cry—at weddings, at the movies, but this was different. She cupped her face, and her shoulders shook, and when I met her eyes, I saw she wept because her heart was full as well as breaking, because the picture inspired love in her, bringing both solace and pain.

Shortly after this piercing moment, Bringley remembers the guards at the Met. “Could there really be this loophole where I could drop out of the forward-marching world and spend all day tarrying in an entirely beautiful one?” He applies for the job, gets it, and is there for the next decade.

Bringley is a brilliant observer of the paintings and the artifacts and the life of the museum—the guards who become his friends, people from all over the world, and the visitors, with their cranks and misapprehensions and delights. On his last day, he gets to have a conversation he has had many times over the years: he has to disappoint a young woman who wants to see the Mona Lisa. “What? You don’t have, like, a copy of it?… Well, where are your da Vinci paintings?” No luck there, either. There is only one da Vinci in the US, and it’s in DC. You can understand the poor woman’s bafflement. You’ve made all this effort to go to an enormous place full of old masters, so you might as well get everything ticked off all at once. Otherwise, what’s the point?

There are nuggets throughout the book that you’ll want to remember: the signs behind the scenes that say yield to art in transit, a slogan I want on a T-shirt, and surely a motto for The Believer; the advice Bringley receives that twelve hours on a wooden floor is the equivalent of eight hours on stone, podiatrically speaking. I didn’t know the Met owned thirty thousand baseball cards, left to the museum by a man named Jefferson Burdick, who didn’t like baseball but loved cards. The one depicting Honus Wagner, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first years of the twentieth century, is worth somewhere in the region of seven million dollars, if recent auctions are any indication. And I didn’t know about the Met Cloisters, way up in Manhattan beyond the George Washington Bridge, which specializes in medieval art and architecture. It’s the setting for another exquisite chapter in the book. Bringley’s then new girlfriend (now his wife and the mother of his children) lives up that way, and they have a magical early date there. His brother’s funeral took place on the day they were supposed to get married, and the writing is suffused with pain and hope.

This is really a book about love—of art, of people—written with love. There aren’t many of those. Bringley loves his visitors, loves his wife and kids and family, loves his colleagues, and all this love is contained and channeled into his love for the art. And he is a terrific art critic, writing unpretentiously about craft and context, rather than vaguely about mood and meaning.

A long time ago, I wrote a short story about a security guard at a museum. (The story is called “NippleJesus,” and it’s in an anthology called Speaking with the Angel.) I wrote it because it seemed to me that the relationship between a work of art and the person who looks at it all day, every day, has to be a profound one. The penultimate chapter of All the Beauty in the World is about two shows at the Met, one by Michelangelo and one by a group of quiltmakers from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and Bringley adores and admires both of them: there’s no difference between them, as far as he’s concerned. Maybe he is one of the few people in the world to understand that.