This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Anyone who follows art world gossip might have caught the news that Inigo Philbrick has apparently started a new business venture. A one-time wünderkind contemporary dealer, Philbrick is notorious for relieving his clients of over $86 million before going on the run in Vanuatu, being arrested by the FBI in 2020 and serving a bit of a seven-year prison sentence.
The BBC released a documentary, The Great Art Fraud, on Philbrick this year, based on 14 hours of interviews. Asked where the money is, Philbrick claimed he doesn’t know.
Aspects of the scam were hugely complex, involving the sale of shares in the same artworks to multiple buyers, and the leveraging of loans against non-existent auction house reserves.
Others were less complex, such as placing blank canvases in crates and sending them to different warehouses on the assumption that none of the people who think they’ve bought that particular Christopher Wool painting will bother opening the box.
It just may be a possibility that Philbrick got away with it for so long not because he’s a devious criminal mastermind, but because his victims were Andrew Mountbatten Windsor-level thick.
The new wheeze involves a mushroom powder beauty supplement which purportedly extends longevity in fruit flies and gives a lovely glow to the complexion. Different product, but Philbrick clearly has the measure of the contemporary art client base.
Take Broken Floor, the site-specific installation created for the Mount Street Restaurant by Rashid Johnson. It is indeed a floor, a palladiana mosaic of coloured marble, which comes with helpful instructions.
The floor “allows guests to explore it, stand on it, interact with it physically”. The restaurant’s staff are also primed to assist diners who might need a bit of extra help when it comes to knowing what to do with a floor.
“It’s got fish in it,” said our waiter when I ordered an omelette Arnold Bennett as a first course. “Yes,” I replied, “I know. That’s why I ordered it.”
The Beef Wellington for two would take 50 minutes, he went on to explain, because it has pastry, and pastry needs to be baked in an oven. We asked if he could put the order in with the kitchen straight away and come back for the other dishes, so that all the mains could arrive at the same time, but the maths got too complicated at that point.
Still, there was lots of art to look at whilst we waited.
Mount Street is part of the Hauser & Wirth gallery/hospitality empire. The first-floor dining room above The Audley pub displays an impressive collection, with pieces by Warhol, Auerbach, Matisse and Lucien Freud, as well as Keith Tyson’s Still Life With White Carbs, an oil painting of lots of different kinds of bread.
Our table had a view of a rather unpleasant female nude with a face like an eager zombie and a portrait of a steak, but the Matisse was probably there somewhere.
When it came, dinner was mostly very good, though a purist might point out that an omelette is not the same as a baked egg and that an echt Arnold Bennett (as created by Jean Baptiste Virlogeux at the Savoy in 1929), requires hollandaise and bechamel sauce, or at least one of the two.
Orkney scallop scampi with warm tartare was a clever take on a dish that might be more at home in a basket downstairs: plump and flavourful in ethereal batter. Lobster pie is one of the best word pairings in the English language, but we already had the pastry challenge going on with the beef, which came with mashed potato, sprightly green beans and a pungent green peppercorn sauce.
The standout was Highland venison with blackberries and more pie, a “gamekeeper” version whose richness was just the right side of rank, a sexy combination against the tart shock of the berries. Stepney smoked trout with kohlrabi, apple, chicory and horseradish crème fraiche was, however, an absolute mess, a slimy and rebarbative quarrel of a dish.
Mount Street’s prices are strictly Mayfair, which is fair enough as it’s in Mayfair, and there’s lots to like if you don’t mind being treated as a bit remedial. The floor is really lovely, the cooking broadly accomplished, and you have to love anywhere that is so enthusiastic about pies.
There’s also a lot wrong with the place. The acoustics are absolutely horrible, though perhaps that doesn’t matter if no-one has anything interesting to say; the wine list is poncey and the atmosphere oddly joyless. By 9pm ours was the only table still occupied.
Perhaps it’s that the restaurant’s concept is as tired as its clients. Contemporary art just feels old. By the time this piece is published, Maurizio Cattelan’s America will have been auctioned at Sotheby’s, with a starting price of ten million dollars.
America is a functioning solid gold toilet, whose concept is the critique of the inequalities of capitalism and a coruscating dissection of the meaning and values of the art world.
To put it another way, the stupidity of many contemporary buyers is equalled only by the obscenity of their wealth: not so catchy, but evidently serviceable to Philbricks. Mount Street’s food would be better without the art on the side.
