YouSaid · the spoken record

Orlando Whitfield

lines on the record: 28
first: 2024-07-28
most recent: 2024-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I mean, obviously, I had had a long association both professionally and personally with Indigo. I was not involved in what the FBI calls his fraud scheme. So, I mean, yes, I'm a very anxious and occasionally quite paranoid person. And so, yeah, there were definitely dark nights of the soul where I thought, well, is there something that I was involved with within a Go that's now being looked at by some kind of suit and tie law enforcement individual somewhere in a fluorescent lit room? Am I going to be run up? Realistically, you know I think that was more anxious, paranoia than anything based in the reality of any actions.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When friends used to ask me, I used to joke that it would be Timothy Charlemagne in a fat suit. But I really am afraid don't have. We're still talking to writers. It's a long way off being in production. I'm thrilled that HBO, it's in development with HBO, but it's been optioned by a company called Badwolf, who are based in Cardiff. And they are just wonderful people to work with, Jane Trantor and Dan McCulloch and a lot of other guys there have been really supportive. And they actually optioned the book a long time ago back in April of 22 and we just said it was sort of secret until then And that's been a great experience. But I'd be thrilled if it gets made, but I'm also aware that some of these things just never actually do get made. I wasn't interested in writing it. The book is the thing for me and I'm thrilled that it's out there.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I know a few people who've been involved in the BBC film. Neither of it and two people, neither of whom have been particularly positive about their experience in making it. And I've been approached a couple of times by them. And it sounds to me from talking to the people and knowing that having done some research into the company that's making it, I can't quite figure out how they're going to make this film. I don't know what the angle seems to be quite kind of PR- but I've no idea. We shall see. I mean, sorry, it was, yeah.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, absolutely not. No, I still love, I've got many good friends in the art world upstanding. Financially adroit friends who work in the art world and who do good shows. And I love hearing the gossip because there are characters galore in that world. But I have no desire to go back to it. I loved, I always wanted to write, and I'm working on something new and I've got various magazine commissions. And I'm happier doing this than I ever was being an art dealer.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the first draft of the book was very different in lots of ways. I mean, the proposal was very different in lots of ways. I was never, yeah. I don't think I would have necessarily been allowed to publish a defence, as it were, but I think there might have been scope for a book which might have been more of a young man in over his head narrative. But that's just, it's just not true.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it was the spreadsheet. There was so much detail that it really didn't, it took me a couple of months after his arrest to actually get through it all and to kind of actually start forming for me at least a full picture of what had happened. But yeah, it became pretty incontrovertible.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I very much believed his. His line was This is a young man in over his head, and I very much believed that for I mean Really a long, long time, I mean probably about a year after he was arrested, long after I sold the book. And I think that certainly my US editor was really worried that the book that I was going to write a book that was going to be a kind of a bit more of a... I don't think I come down particularly hard on Lineigo. I make no value judgment or moral judgment about what he did. I think I tried just to present the facts and allow people to make their own minds up. But I really think I was still... I mean to say under someone's spell, I don't think would be a particular exaggeration. This was a friendship unlike anything else I've ever really encountered. And I think that I was.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I now, I mean, I've realized, so I've learned a huge amount from working with John and with my editor at Profile. And I've realized that this is, I think people have come, a lot of people have come up to me who've read the book and said, no, they've read books. My nephew, who I'm staying at my sister's at the moment, and my nephew is reading art history at the moment and wants to become an auctioneer and is reading books like Michael Schneerson's book Boom and Georgina Adam's book, Dark Side of the Boom. I think those books are really good, but I hope that for a more lay reader, for someone who just wants an experience of it, it gives... A fairly well, I mean, it's obviously a very subjective look at that world. And, you know, most people who work in that world do not encounter the kind of criminality that I did.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, I've been trying to figure out how to write a book about the art world, and it was only really when I met my agent, John Ash, and he made me see that the best way to tell this was to tell my story, to tell a story rather than to write some kind of didactic thing about, oh, well, this is what the secondary market is.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I never actually took any notes. I mean, I had a lot of emails and photographs and memories and text messages and stuff like that. But yeah, I think pretty around 2018, maybe a little bit earlier than that. And it wasn't necessarily going to be about Indigo. And it's funny actually earlier you mentioned the emperor's new clothes, a very early draft or an early proposal that I wrote for this book back in early 2019 was called The Empire of New Clothes. But everyone thought it was about fashion, so I had to change that.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This was a deal that went on for months on end, and I knew he was lying to me and I had to believe him because otherwise the money was just going to disappear. And I think I realized once that whole thing was finally over that. Know if that was how he could treat me as someone whom he told, you know, he used to tell me he loved me like a brother, all this kind of stuff. If that's how he could treat me, I had no idea how badly other people were being messed around. And I'd heard rumors and I've heard a lot more since. But I think lying became almost habitual for him.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I guess I sort of realised that then, but I didn't, you know, I didn't have facts. It was purely speculative. But there is a couple of chapters in my book which cover a particular deal in which I was involved with Inigo. That was once a kind of, I think, a turning point for our friendship in that I. Had always suspected, or at least hoped, that I knew how badly he treated his other clients or other people he dealt with. I had no idea that he was That he would, I sort of figured that our friendship would somehow act as a prophylactic to him treating me like that, but I was wrong. And B, I started to see quite how much... Guess kind of arbitrage that was going on. You know, it was robbing Peter to pay Paul to rob them both over again.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, for a long time, after I left. After I stopped working for a go in 2016, I set up a gallery with a friend, and it was really around that time that I realized that. Quite not necessarily simply quite how difficult it was to do to put together these deals that he was doing on a more or less daily basis. To make the amount of money that he seemed to be making from them, and my old business partner and I used to have conversations in which we would say, you know, he's not just, it's not just straight art dealing what Indigo is doing. It couldn't be. There's just no way. And Indigo said the same to me. No one makes as much money as he was making by doing it straight.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The one thing I would say, just to finish on that, is the one thing we might be able to do is to say, because I'm sure you're aware that Inigo has said that he wants to be an art dealer again. I mean, I think there's one thing we might do is to say, if you've got a criminal record for wire fraud or similar, that being an art dealer might be something that you shouldn't do.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And despite the financialization of the market, the number of people involved in it are so small and that there are very, I mean, there may be art-based pensions out there but were betide. I think basically who would do it because almost all of these deals are international at the higher end, a lot of these deals involve something moving from a Swiss freeport to be viewed in a London warehouse to be hung in a New York penthouse. Where is the authority for business? I can't imagine that there is really much political appetite these days given everything else that's going on to set up a kind of art international force. And so this stuff will, I'm afraid to say, will continue.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For him to go, who I'd never met before. This is someone who worked with him long after I stopped working with him Wrote to me and had read my book and just said, you know, this episode ruined my life. She went to therapy, her relationship broke up. And I think we're in real danger. There were other employees of Inigos whose lives were completely shattered and they have never heard from him ever again. No apology. I mean, nothing at all. We're moving away, I know, from the regulation here, but I think necessarily that the regulation is just... The global art market, and this includes all art, bought and sold, is estimated to be around a $65 billion market annually. But the number of people involved in it is absolutely minute.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that is the $86 million question. There is an anecdote. I think at the end of the book, I mean, it is a pseudonym, but someone I know went to this part, went to a party in New York where a young gallery director at one of the big galleries was marrying someone who worked in, let's say, law enforcement. And this person I knew said, oh, you know, look, I can point to all of these people in the room and I can tell you what these guys have done. And this guy got, he got quite heated and he tells this law enforcement guy, you know, that guy, I know he did X, Y, and Z and he ripped off all these people and on and on and on. And the guy said, no one cares. It's rich people stealing from rich people. And that is largely true. I have been contacted by someone only in the last few days who worked.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And those people all need to take a cut. We all need, as I said, slightly whimsically in the book. We all need to put caviar on the table. And so that's how the prices grow is that you could offer me, say you've got a million dollar picture and I have a client for it, but I don't know that client directly. So I have an advisor who I know everyone's going to add on a little bit of money to it. And so at that point, when that end buyer, say five years down the line decides, well, it's time to sell that picture, their expectation of what it must make on the market, whether it's private sale or at auction, is necessarily higher because they don't actually know what the original price paid to the original owner was. So suddenly you've created kind of half a million dollars, let's say, more or less out of thin air.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in terms of how value is created, I mean, value is created, as you say, yes, by these very moneyed cliques who all know each other. But I mean, I don't know, I don't think that this value creation is necessary conscious. So I think to do it consciously would actually probably backfire unless you're fixing prices at auction, in which case. But I just think that it is such a small band of brigands, as it were, running around the world doing this stuff. They all know each other. They all talk about it at the same time. And then there are so many people like me and Inigo and all of the dealers and advisors that populate my book.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Conceptual, and that there's moments in the book where I talk about Robert Irwin, but also the solar Whitwall drawing, which we installed. And those things which are expensive to own, but you could do your own. And I kind of love that idea.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think that was part of the reason that I felt quite similar to you in that was my real problem as an art dealer, was I really couldn't find it in me to convince myself that these things were worth the hundreds of thousands of prices that people were asking. I was really good as a dealer at sort of selling things for between the kind of five and ten thousand mark. I could do that all day long. But Inigo was really, he genuinely, for some reason, was convinced of this stuff. And I don't know whether maybe that's to do with the fact that he had grown up around it with absolutely zero skepticism about the contemporary art market, whereas my father was deeply skeptical about all of these things. And I came to it all with skepticism. I think I also spend a lot of time being, I fell really in love with...”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Both in equal measure. I was given this enormous, and there was a photograph of me somewhere covered and chopped. That had kept me.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only time I ever. see my father at When he was working at Bonham Mother, for I remember being given enormous slice of chocolate fudge cake. Think I'd worked out, I didn't know what bidding was, but I think Think I've worked out that if I put my hand Cause some kind of disruption and it either amuse or annoy.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And his mother is an artist We both came from Deeply embedded in that world Inigo, I think, had had more exposure to it. I think his parents kind of took him a long term. Museum openings”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invited us all to a party at this house that he was living in. We went, and that was the evening in which Inigo and I became friends, I think, really. I then was doing an internship later that summer in New York. The auction house and Dinigo was back in America with his family living in Connecticut for the summer. Saw quite a lot of each other there. And it was on a trip to Dia Beacon Museum in upstate New York. proposed, as I think he said, putting together a few art deals, and I don't really have a clue what that meant. I had grown up in that world, but my father was an auctioneer His professional life very separ I really hadn't got a clue what he was suggesting.”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're young. Yeah, 1920. I think, yeah, Inigo and I were born in the same only a few months apart. So yeah, we were both about 19, I think, when we first encountered each other. And then at the end of our first year at Goldsmith, he was living in this kind of bizarre sort of genteel squat next to the British Museum in central London. Extraordinary Georgian house full of artists and curators and designers, and you know, we were all living in halls of residence and having a very different experience. He didn't really hang around with us, and so he would get straight back on the bus after lectures and would disappear. Later we found out he was hobnobbing with all these people. But at the time, we just. Had no idea, and that curious, but so as I say, yeah, at the end of the first year, he”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start talking in the middle of a lecture, he would query the professors. He would quite happily have cross lecture hall debates with people with much, much more learning and erudition. And so I was very aware of him and aware of not necessarily who he was, but what he was capable of, I guess, at that point, or let's say a little of what he was capable of. Sorry, you're all”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, those are two separate events, and I guess I could go one step further back in that I first encountered Dinigo a long time before we really met or had a kind of conversation. We were both on the art history course at Goldsmith, although there was very little history involved. It was very sort of a theory-based course. And Inigo was one of only, you know, it was a course of 45 people and one of only five other men on the course. And so he was instantly noticeable. But he was primarily noticeable for his... Extraordinary confidence, his ability to”
2024-07-28 · Intelligence Squared · A Story of Fine Art, Friendship and Fraud, with Orlando Whitfield · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT