Art World Infamy: Inigo Philbrick – Golden Boy (Ep. 2)

0:01I'm Eileen Kinsella and this is Artworld Infamy, a podcast miniseries from Artnet News.

0:20So Jay is Jay Joplin, the founder of London's White Cube, who is best known for his ties to one of the biggest contemporary art scenes of Britain. You know, in the 1990s, the young British artist. Joplin is one of London's most celebrated primary market dealers. As a young art journalist starting her career in London, Charlotte Burns had firsthand experience with the illustrious gallerist Jay Joplin. To say that he's an art world power player is an understatement. His love of art was cultivated at a young age. As a child, he spent hours at the Tate Museum and visiting churches in Venice with his mother.

1:01He actually bought his first artwork when he was just 14, a limited edition copy of Gilbert and George's book titled Dark Shadow, for just 16 pounds. It was in the late 1980s in London where he first became friends with the now-iconic names of the YBA group, the acronym for Young British Artists. This included a young Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin, who he connected directly with, often socially, and then began hearing out their brazen art ideas and helping them execute them, essentially acting as a manager from the start. From the beginning, Jay managed to pull off a great balancing act, demonstrating both loyalty and support of their bold work, while also imparting his magic touch to their respective markets.

1:45He helped secure major patrons early on while he steadily built up buzz and demand. Jay Joplin, White Cube. Are you from London? How are you doing? Yeah, well, welcome to New York. Yes. You came during the right time of year. How are you guys? Who are you? Are you Jay Joplin? I'm Jay Joplin. You're Jay Joplin, and you're who? Tracy Emin. Hi, Tracy. Emin is a classic example of a young artist who both shocked and fascinated viewers with her candid confessional art. When Tracy first met Jay in a London bar, she famously persuaded him to give her£10 in exchange for a series of somewhat shocking confessional letters delivered monthly.

2:25She went on to become extraordinarily famous and successful, both from a critical and financial standpoint. Just last year, in 2024, she received a damehood from King Charles for her service to the arts. I always just thought, you know, never let lack of money get in the way of an idea or, you know, something like that. And then, obviously, when I was a kid, I'd seen Jaws. I thought, why can't we do a big shark? I just immediately thought it's got to be big enough to eat you, and then in a volume of liquid that would be big enough to frighten you. In 1991, it was Jay who helped Hurst find the 15-foot tiger shark that would eventually be submerged in formaldehyde and become his famous work with the complex title, The Physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living.

3:12The shark was quickly sold to mega collector Charles Saatchi for around$100 ,000, which many regarded as a jaw-dropping price for a wild artwork at the time.

3:28A little over 25 years ago, Jay opened the first version of White Cube, a name that was inspired by Brian Doherty's critical essay, Inside the White Cube. The gallery started as a small space owned by Christie's on Duke Street. He had somehow persuaded them to let him use it rent-free. Over the course of two decades, it grew into a mega-gallery, with branches in Hong Kong, New York, and Paris. And at one point, there were three massive locations in London. Now there's one in Mason's Yard in central London, and another in Bermondsey in southeast London. At 58 ,000 square feet of interior space, The Bermondsey location is one of the largest commercial art galleries in the world.

4:10Melanie Gerlis is an art market correspondent for London's Financial Times and also writes a monthly column for the art newspaper. She watched White Cube's ambitious expansion in the mid-aughts and beyond. It was basically in lockstep with the broader growth of the contemporary art market. White Cube, sort of almost in response, you know, the London stalwart, opened a vast, vast space in Bermondsey. I mean, it's like an aircraft hangar. It's so big. Actually, Bermondsey for Y-Cube was quite central because they'd been further out in Hoxton before and they had a small space in Mayfair. So the London market was kind of centralizing more around these big international hotels in Mayfair.

4:50By the mid-1990s in London, there was a full-blown cultural resurgence. Art, music, and fashion merged to create a scene that many still recall fondly today. At least one of the sparks was lit in 1988. with Damien Hirst's milestone exhibition, Freeze. That's F-R-E-E-Z-E. The Renegade Student Show was organized in an empty building at Surrey Docks. It included fellow YBAs like Angus Fairhurst, Gary Hume, and Sarah Lucas. Freeze created the momentum for the larger and more contentious show, Sensation, which was at the Royal Academy in 1997 and was heavily centered on the YBAs. The English music scene was also thriving.

5:32Britpop bands like Oasis and The Verve dominated the airwaves, the Spice Girls were rocketing to fame, and the underground London rave scene was at its peak. The fashion world was introduced to the talents of designers Alexandra McQueen, Phoebe Philo, and Hussein Shalayan. London had become the cool kid of international cities, setting the stage for the next chapter of the art market boom.

5:57The now world-famous Frieze Art Fair was first launched in London in 2003, and that's F-R-I-E-Z-E. It grew out of the eponymous magazine founded by British tastemakers Amanda Sharp and Matthew Sladover. It always seemed like they had their finger on the pulse of art and culture and knew exactly what was going on. So it wasn't surprising when their Freeze Art Fair was an immediate smash hit with the art world. Freeze was more of an instant hit. It just came straight after all this cool Britannia. suddenly England had good music. It was kind of edgy, glam. I think Gwyneth Paltrow went in the early days.

6:33I'm pretty sure I saw her. It was just at the same time as in a way that the banking money that had already been made in New York in the 90s came to London in the early 2000s. We had tape, modern built and suddenly contemporary art, cool music. It was all wrapped in the same thing. So Frieze was a bit more of an instant hit. For Frieze, actually, they had to kind of grow up. They had to go from being a fun, people rolling down Paolo Pivi hills in the middle of a tent and people smoking. People were smoking inside the tent at the first Frieze Art Fair. Then you get a few dealers that were like, OK, I really don't want to show my fine, fine works next to people rolling down hills and smoking.

7:15So they kind of had to grow up a bit to meet the international art world. Right at the time the contemporary art market was really taking off in the early aughts, the success of the fair prompted Christie's and Sotheby's to quickly create a flurry of contemporary art-themed auctions. They were taking advantage of the flood of buyers and trendsetters coming to London, and it worked. An entire art season sprung up around this fair as if overnight.

7:44Inigo, a young American man, slipped easily into this elite slice of the art world in 2006. with a coveted internship at White Cube. He was also entering the prestigious Goldsmiths College, following in the footsteps of his father, Harry Philbrick, a museum director who was known for his Midas touch. Inigo's careful study of artist markets and attention to detail, including which artists were on the rise and who might be on the decline, was remarkable. And it quickly caught the attention of Jay Jopling. By the time Inigo graduated from college, he had more than proved his market savvy and financial acumen.

8:21He was given a role as manager of Jopling's secondary market operation, known as Modern Collections. Even if most of the art world had not yet heard of Inigo, they would definitely recognize and respect Jay Jopling's stamp of approval. Charlotte recounts her first encounter with the very young and very ambitious Inigo Philbrick. I have a very clear memory of that, actually. It was many, many years ago at a Fries art fair in London. I was working at the art newspaper. I was the US news and art market editor. And I'd come back to London from New York. We were doing the daily newspapers. I was talking to a dealer about a new secondary market gallery that had opened in Mayfair called Modern Collections.

9:05And I was mentioning it to a separate dealer that I was talking to at the fair saying, oh, you know, have you heard about this? and he said oh yeah well that's actually tied to jay and i was like oh interesting it was kind of big news that he was tied to the secondary market gallery secondary market is a term for whatever art business activity happens after a work is sold directly from a gallery show or from the artist to the initial buyer depending on how much market demand there is for a particular artist the price tends to go up on subsequent resales So, if you were lucky enough to get your hands on a work by Damien Hirst or Tracy Emin for a few thousand pounds when White Cube first organized shows of their work, chances are you would make a tidy profit if you held on to that for a while and then eventually resold.

9:56It's the art world's version of the old stock market adage, buy and hold. It can be a lucrative universe for savvy pickers, but not necessarily for the artist in question, who typically doesn't benefit from or have any real connection or control over resales that happen further down the line. So this is 2011, so Freeze Masters hasn't even opened yet. It opened the following year. So Freeze is still very much a primary market fair, which means that all the dealers there are very much about supporting artists directly. The secondary market is when you're selling works without the artist being involved, which artists don't always like because they're not involved in the deal.

10:37They don't know where the works are going. They don't get a cut of the sale and usually works sell for a lot more on the secondary market and the artists don't get a cut of any of that profit. So it can be more controversial from the artist's point of view. And if you are a dealer who's really making your reputation as a primary market gallery, as someone really invested in supporting artists in that direct way, it can be a little more controversial depending on how you manage your relationships with your artists so it was news for a journalist day whatever it was of the daily newspapers I was thrilled so I spoke to my editors and was like oh I have some news Jade's involved in this new Mayfair gallery modern collections they were like great go to the gallery go find out so I hop on the tube, get across to Mayfair, go into the gallery, and I see this kind of skinny guy in a go-fill brick.

11:30And I was like, hi, I'm Charlotte Burns. I'm here to see this show. It was a Wade Guyton and Kelly Walker show. Both of them were artists that weren't represented by White Cube or modern collections. And they were both artists who were very much in demand on the market. Both of their prices were high at that time. Their works were selling way over primary market prices on the secondary market. It's important to note that the high asking prices on the secondary market were crucial to modern collections and thus Inigo's operation. The business model was basically a bet that collector demand was so intense that it would support the much higher asking prices.

12:12You know, I quoted a collector in an article I wrote who said that Works that were around$20 ,000 six or seven years before were now around$800 ,000 on the secondary market. So these were really hot artists. They're in this Mayfair show and there's this guy I'd never seen before. And he was like a skinny, pale looking guy. Maybe even a few little spots. Looked a little awkward, you know, and a nice enough guy, like friendly. And I was like, I said I was with the art newspaper. I said I was writing about the opening of the show. He was telling me a lot about the works. He was kind of academic, a little nerdy, if anything.

12:46And then I said, oh, am I correct that Jay Jockling is involved in this, that he has a stake in the business? Because that was the part that wasn't being publicly announced. And then he was like, oh, you know, and he was slightly awkward and nervous about it. So I was like, oh, great. I've got a great story. He seemed so young. And he was, I think, the former head of secondary market sales at White Cube. And it was just a curious thing because it was like, Jay was one of London's biggest dealers. He wasn't being public about the fact that this was a gallery he had a stake in. So it was news.

13:21Charlotte's story raised the question of whether galleries were breaching hidden codes of conduct by reselling works by their younger artists at far inflated prices to satisfy intense demand. Melanie, who was working with Charlotte at the time, recalled that the article garnered quite a bit of attention because it addressed the very real issue that such fast rising prices could be unsustainable or worse, disastrous for the artist in question. I remember working on daily newspapers during the Frieze Art Fair in 2012 when one of my colleagues, Charlotte Burns, got the news basically that Inigo was going to head this new secondary market gallery run through White Cube in which Jay Jopling and White Cube were investing.

14:07And she wrote a big, big feature that was called Too Much Too Young. She was writing about artists who were selling too quickly on the secondary market, young artists who were selling much, much quicker than they had done in the past. And of course, in addition to the primary question of money, you have optics to consider. Here is one of London's biggest art dealers suddenly backing a dedicated secondary market gallery and quietly putting someone so young and still relatively unknown in charge. My editor was like, great story, go and beef it up, go around talking to people at the fair. And so I did.

14:45I got some details on the pricing. Plus, they're really interesting artists like Wade Guyton specifically is an artist who really tries to mess with his own market as well and continue to do so. It's not like when Jay just opened in New York, there was a whole big media strategy around having a lot of media attention. They decided to do this very quietly and have someone that wasn't in the art world. You know, no one really knew who Inigo was. That was kind of the point of it. And so Jay did it quietly on purpose, I guess, because it was a different way of doing something. It was a secondary market gallery owned by a very prominent primary market dealer.

15:21All the big primary market dealers do secondary market sales, but they don't necessarily open a secondary market gallery totally separately of artists that aren't theirs that they don't represent because it's so aggressive. Speaking of aggressive, Inigo is just that, constantly making suggestions to Jay from the start about which works he should prune from his holdings and sell off in hopes of targeting better, more lucrative opportunities. It explains, at least in part, Inigo's extreme emphasis and focus on secondary market works. Charlotte explains why, in some ways, it made sense for dealers to become more deeply involved in secondary market trading.

16:03But in fairness to the dealers, it's an existential threat. If you are building an artist career and you are putting all this effort in and you're a mom and pop shop essentially or you get backing or however you do it but if you're a dealer you are taking a risk on your artist and everybody talks about the artist who hit it big you know they're the ones who make it but they don't talk about all the other artists in your stable who don't or they take a long time and they're the ones who get the critical attention and they're the ones who might make it into the biennales but they're not the ones who are really keeping the gallery going so you're going to have a few stars and they're the ones that the collectors are going to focus on but your stable of artists aren't all going to be big financial hitters and you have to support the whole gallery and production and the production budgets for everything have increased and as we've gone through this boom period there have been more fairs there have been more biennales there have been more events everybody's been doing more and it was like fair teague became this thing people started talking about how much they were doing and so the amount of work people have been doing just to keep up the amount of work artists have been doing producing you know it's been production heavy if you think of 2011 to now in the amount of work it's kind of been this glut and gluttony as people have been trying to attract, you know, there's been more sales, more auctions, more, more, more, more countries coming in, more new buyers, this sense of almost frenzied expansion.

17:39You know, you had to have unlimited, you know, our Basel has been called unlimited, this sense of infinite potential growth. And you have to be there and you have to be making the money and you have to be selling because if you don't, your slot's not going to be there next year. You know, if your artist gets into a biennale, you have to go and you have to go and spend all the crazy money going to Venice at that time of year, putting up all your staff, shipping whatever you're going to ship through a flooded city. The cost of doing business, if you're a dealer, supporting your artists is insane.

18:12You know, the dealers are doing all of that. And then if they're selling works for primary artists for like$20 ,000, then on the secondary market, it's going for 800 ,000, you are going to think, okay, I need to do something about that. And at that point, it was a few years later in this recent period, immediately it's been selling, it's been being flipped. And so the dealers have been having to think like, how do you cope with that? How do you protect your artist? How do you figure out who to sell to? And if you're a collector, you have to think about how to deal with that. Because if you bought a work, maybe you really meant to keep that forever.

18:45But then all of a sudden, that's like your entire kid's college fund, what do you do? And so the injection of capital, that enormous amount of money into the system, it just changes the way that everybody behaves, including the artists. And so what do you do when that much money goes into a system? It changes everything. Of course, as more money was pouring into the market, it attracted the attention of profit seekers who didn't necessarily know or care about art. They might have a lot of capital, but not necessarily access to or even affinity for the art. That's where Inigo came in. And though it wasn't immediately obvious to those he was advising, he was painting wildly different pictures of the worth of a work or how much a respective investor owned.

19:27His story was based on who they were and what he thought they might want to hear. But not everyone was impressed with Inigo, including art advisor Todd Levin. The word that kept coming up most often in the Phil Brick description was charm. It wasn't integrity or honesty or trustworthiness or loyalty or discretion or intelligence or experience or expertise. Oh, and Edge. Edge came up too. He's got about as much edge as Mr. Rogers. Others, like art advisor Ben Godsell, saw something else. For someone so young and new on the scene, he seemed to always be in the most exclusive spots and always wearing the right clothes.

20:09He seemed cool. He showed up in all the right places. He was wearing the right suits. That was kind of dashing and super Euro in a way, even though he's American. So he had this kind of Euro chicness about him. A la shtad guy or something like that. He seemed fun. Like he stayed out late, like I did at the time. He seemed like a good guy and showed in his gallery in London and was active in the rooms with a number of artists that I also found to be important. I was a little bit jealous, right? I thought he was doing cool secondary market shows of not older blue chip artists, but what we could term emerging blue chip artists, people like Wade Guyton, for instance.

20:42And so I thought it was like a really smart business model. I was a little jealous that he had found a way to have a physical space where he was able to broker deals as well as do shows kind of contextualizing these artists. It wasn't just his social connections, style, and affinity for the finer things in life. Inigo's apparent market savvy and seeming ability to spin gold and rake in profits on the secondary market was also catching the art world's eye, including art market reporters. To Melanie, Inigo represented a new generation of art buyers. He reached out to me through a middle person in 2018, so late, sort of six years ago, and he was keen to tell me about a venture he was starting in Miami, but he wanted to talk to me.

21:24So we met for coffee. A few things struck me about him. I mean, he was very young to be in this position of, I mean, he was very involved in guarantees at auction, selling things via auction, buying things at auction at really, really quite high levels. He loved talking about prices. He loved talking about the market and about value. Certainly keen to tell me of artists that I now know he was very invested in that he thought were undervalued. He was keen to get prices a bit better for Marc Grigion and Taba Auerbach and some of the artists in George Condo that he was in and out of. But he was also charming, seemed great fun, and he had this transatlantic accent he seemed from the new exciting art market.

22:11From his earliest days at White Cube, Inigo had an intense knack for knowing where key artworks were located and how and when to pry them loose from respective collectors for a possible sale. After just a few years at White Cube, his wheeling and dealing had proved so lucrative that one reference described him as a standout performer and an art trader who single-handedly was generating 10 times the profits of the gallery's sprawling 150-member team. The gallery had even hired a new consultant whose main role was to keep him there in golden handcuffs if necessary.

22:48One of Inigo's strategies was to focus in on particular artists and their respective markets, diving deep into research in hopes of taking advantage of rising demand and interest. That had been the idea for the inaugural show of Wade Guyton and Kelly Walker, where asking prices reflected a sharp increase. And as Charlotte notes, this was an effective approach. by concentrating on a few artists you become the go-to person for a few artists not the go-to because there are a lot of people trading these artists but you become someone in the mix of these names and he was making a lot of money and people were going to him especially people who wanted to trade and that's a lot of people at that time when there were a lot of trades happening there was a lot of money in the market and there wasn't necessarily as much diligence going on because there was just so much money in the market.

23:40People were moving very first. Between his stylish appearance and ability to persuade, people, including Melanie, could easily believe why even seasoned collectors might be willing to hand over six and seven figure amounts to someone so young. He was impeccably dressed, really quite charming. You could see how he could win over a potential seller or buyer and everyone else in between. He took me for a very, very, very nice lunch, really generous and then he took me to show me his gallery and while we were there I just remember that he was very very proud to have a cushion on the sofa in this space that he had stolen or pinched if you like from the place where we just had lunch not that day but another day he's like oh look at this look at this at the time I thought why would someone with so much going for him and so much need the buzz of nicking a restaurant cushion there was just always something a little bit on the edge about that.

24:38A huge part of Inigo's success was based on access to major artists like Gilbert and George and building trust with high-profile collectors such as Daniel Temple and Loretta Wartenberger aka Fine Art Partners aka FAP. Inigo was also involved in deals with Belgian collector Bert Cruik and managed an art investment fund for Israeli-Canadian billionaire Mark Steinberg. The very fact that he was actively buying and selling for so many ultra-wealthy collectors not only meant non-traditional buying and selling agreements, it also allowed him to have much easier access to capital. They trusted the stories he told or seemingly demonstrated about profits.

25:17He was also beginning to display many of the outward trappings of success, from splurges at restaurants and travel on private jets, to bespoke suits and pricey watches. These were on display at the elite Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips night auctions. Charlotte and I have often joked about how we were always standing near one another during the evening auctions, straining our necks to report on the action and try to see who is bidding on what, all the while clutching our catalogs and taking notes while gathered in the designated press pen in the auction sale rooms. Our journalists typically cluster in a spot on the side or the back of the room.

25:54Collectors and auction attendees are clearly seated according to a hierarchy that reflects activity and importance in the market. For all the years we've both been covering major sales, we agree that the seating chart of the rooms changes either not at all or minimally at best. The thing that happens in the room is that the room is relatively unchanging. If you stand where the journalists stand, which is top front in one of the auction houses, back left in one of the other auction houses, you're always in the same place. and basically the same people are sitting in the same seats for those 15 years.

26:27There's a little bit of change. There was a moment when there were like new buyers from China and then they had a few seats further up the front. There was a moment there was like Russian buyers and they had seats and then they all left. So there's a little bit of turnover in like the new buyers. But essentially like the big collecting families have the same seats. The dealers have the same kind of seats. They move up and down depending on like which artists are in the sale, who's going to bid. and the auction houses do a very orchestrated job. It's like very choreographed dinner party, essentially.