Art World Informants.
Our beach read recs, round three.
One of the things that caught my eye in the battle between Barbara Guggenheim and Abigail Asher is the accusation that Guggenheim spent $12,000 of the firm’s money self-publishing a book.1 Guggenheim has put out a couple of books with Marmont Lane; Asher’s lawsuit suggests that these books cost Guggenheim to publish them. If true, it’s interesting to learn the mechanics of publishing Art World: The New Rules of the Game (2020),2 an object of fascination for me since it came out. Art World is a star in a constellation of books about dealing art by people beyond the veil.3 Perhaps it’s more of a marketing initiative than exposé4—how does brightly does it shine in that constellation?
It’s not bad. Guggenheim knows the terrain, having made important contributions in different roles at the highest levels—not least as a broker/dealer/advisor.5 She walks you through some of the Frequently Asked Questions of new entrants to the noble pastime of collecting, and writes ably and occasionally with effervescent verve. But most conspicuous is the un-piercing-ness of the gaze—and that has a lot to do with the needle Guggenheim is trying to thread. How to talk about discretion and secrecy without ending her own career? Every dealer who sits down to write such a book grapples with this problem, and the compromise either pushes the life out of the writing or the writer out of the life.
Case in point: David Guenther’s charming The Art Dealer’s Apprentice (2024). Guenther’s story of finding a place under the wing of an eccentric dealer in her Sunset Boulevard years is deeply resonant with me—so many of his portraits and scenes are spot-on and slightly triggering. Even though his story begins fifteen years before mine career began, Guenther’s effort to make sense of the kind-of-crazy shit the artworld throws at the lowest wrung of its ladder was entirely unchanged when I started working for my own eccentric Sunset Boulevard-type—and there’s a great comfort in learning that the sense of isolation and inadequacy and foredoomed failure were not special to me, but shared by probably hundreds or thousands of others who took their first job at the front desk. Guenther laments his own midwestern rectitude, and he’s not wrong: the book is very truthy, but a little over-polite. And there’s the compromise at work: he declares from the outset that the artworld is too rich for his blood, and he only feels comfortable giving you all the warts because he determines to leave it, forever, a few years in. He’s made a decorous career as “clinical professor of law and director of the International Transactions Clinic at the University of Michigan,”6 and one suspects his impressive post-artworld career has tempered his critique of the trade. It’s a little dry, considering the colorful personalities he covers.
Another way to get distance from your subject is to be chased out by scandal. All That Glitters (2024), Orlando Whitfield’s thrilling account of his friendship and business with noted artworld fraudster Inigo Philbrick makes for damper reading than Guenther’s mostly because his subject has already been convicted. Whitfield wastes no time cutting down to the bone:
“Those things which he was not allowed to do on the trading floor at Goldman—act on inside information to artificially inflate prices, choose whom to sell to—were commonplace, even acceptable in the buying and selling of artworks.”7
The artworld is nasty and brutish in Whitfield’s view, informed as it is by Whitfield’s sketchy hero:
“While these documents do not exonerate Inigo, they paint a picture of a world in which some of his actions —now widely decried—are common practice, even encouraged.”8
Are they? Whitfield generalizes from his exceptional subject:
“In the art world, what is termed ‘discretion’—but which others might call deliberate obfuscation or outright lies—is essential to the everyday existence of the market as money.”9
Well, outright lies became essential to the everyday existence of Philbrick’s life, but I don’t know if that’s a fair picture of the artworld generally. Whitfield’s account shines, though, in its sincerity. He was taken in by Philbrick as much as anyone else—perhaps more intimately—and we all have suffered the sort of heartbreak Whitfield describes, if not always with wire fraud charges to show for it. All That Glitters gives us a struggle to make sense of it all—a struggle that continues to the final lines:
“Even failed art dealers can have second chances. It is my sincere wish that Inigo should have one too.”10
Maybe. It’s hard to see how Philbrick doesn’t get back into the trade somehow—he has restitution to pay, after all. But the conclusive sympathy lacks total self-awareness. Whitfield is also a failed art dealer, after all—but if he, too, is entitled to a second chance, he has declined to take it.
Okay, I’ve given you three rounds of light domestic lagers—next round’s on you! What are your best artworld books for unplugging? Drop our readers a line in the comments and the best recommendation gets a free copy of the next thing I publish on paper. (No promises on how long you’ll have to wait).
Cheers,
Jonathan
As reported by Katya Kazakina in “Prominent Art Advisory Implodes After 37 Years, as Ex-Partners Fire Off Lawsuits,” Artnet News.
Or Only In LA: An Insider’s Guide (Even for People Who Live Here! (2024)—the book isn’t named in the allegations.
I mean the veil of opacity endemic to the artworld, not the veil of death.
If it was just a marketing effort, then it may have been money well spent. Far be it from Hanging Papers to throw stones at marketing efforts.
The difference in terminology reflects billing practices more than business strategies.
According to Michigan’s website.
Whitfield, All That Glitters, (2024), p. 174.
Whitfield, p. 391.
Whitfield, p. 218.
Whitfield, p. 424.