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I have been saving a book review from last summer that was in The New York Times Book Review entitled, "As the Art World Turns", which is the story of a young man who scammed the art world along with his friend who, eventually, couldn't stand the heat, bailed and who has now written a book about his experience. The villain, the author's friend and one-time partner, is Inigo Philbrick and his queasy partner, the author, is Orlando Whitfield, and the book is, "All That Glitters". Under the title of the review is the teaser, "A memoir by a former high-end dealer depicts a largely unregulated industry when extravagance goes along with guile and deceit." Juicy that, and anyone who knows me will know that whenever I read about the art world as an "unregulated market", I have to dive in and figure out just what is unregulated--the art market, or was it the behavior of the perpetrators?
I will quote a paragraph from the review that I circled and underlined. "'All That Glitters' is, in one sense, a story of how an unregulated market works. The canny Philbrick, ever attuned to opportunities and incentives, located the soft spots in the system and pushed on them accordingly. Some of his activities--now widely decried--are common practices, even encouraged,' Whitfield remarks. What the art market considers 'discretion' often amounts to 'deliberate obfuscation or outright lies.'" I think that's quite amusing as that sounds like what a cheating doctor might do, or perhaps a cheating investment adviser or possibly even an industry (mortgage backed securities) or even education where a fraud case was settled for $25 million dollars because the university was a scam. Soft spots are everywhere.
It was P.T. Barnum who said that "There's a sucker born every minute." The fact of the matter is that we are all suckers, every last one of us. We just have to be confronted with the right pitch to make us swing and I can guarantee you that you don't have to be in an unregulated market for that to happen. The unregulated market concept is a myth--art dealers have endless regulations to deal with--the paper work is no different than the paperwork that any other small business has. But scammers are everywhere and in all businesses and so they will turn up in the art business. The fact is that if we want to believe, we will, and the type of business has nothing to do with the business that the scammer is in.
Most of the regulations dealers face are tax oriented--city, state and federal of all different kinds, sales and income tax primarily with every state that has sales tax wanting a bite from something you might sell to one of their residents. California for example, threw me a curve ball and dug up a regulation that said I had to register to pay income tax in the state for a four day show. That was aggravating, but it was a regulation. Then there are things we are not allowed to sell or to buy. Ivory and rosewood are the ones that most people know about--any such item can be seized without recompense--but even more odd is our U.S. State Department creating Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with, among a host of others, terrorist states, banning the import of items from those states made prior to 1972. Those items can also be seized. The art world is beset with regulations.
I should not complain. The U.S. is generally laxer in terms of regulations than the European Union. The fact that Philbrick and Whitfield worked out of England surprises me a little, but then illegality is illegality wherever it happens. And that, of course, is the point. There isn't a market in the world that is safe from con artists. I would suggest that the, "the unregulated art market" phrase be dropped for the much more appropriate, art market scam. That's the truth of the matter. But P.T. Barnum probably knew, and newspaper publishers definitely know, that we all love to read about the lurid world of unregulated markets where you pay your money and you take your chances. It sells newspapers, it makes us feel happy that we aren't so foolish as those fools that were scammed and we can tsk, tsk about the unregulated art world. My question regarding the book is whether, "As the Art World Turns", is just another scam? Scam and scam again--getting caught is not much of a deterrent, I guess.
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