An entertaining memoir ... [Whitfield's] impastoed self-portrait as Innocent Naïf is laid on a little thick ...
Whitfield skillfully recounts their exploits moving artwork and money around the world.
In his telling, Mr. Whitfield takes such great pains to present himself as a complete innocent that it stretches credulity ... Mr. Whitfield is best in these passages, as he fires wildly with catty takedowns of every art-world passerby.
Gives a momentous relationship its due, with unusual directness ... Interesting ... One of the most endearing aspects of Whitfield’s narrative is the precision and enthusiasm with which he pinpoints all the traits that drew him to Philbrick and kept drawing him in ... Whitfield...has no interest in...self-serving positioning.
In this tale of greed, excess and lies so slippery you feel as if you’re skating on the surface of a weirdly mirrored reality, the extravagant names are just the tip of an almost unbelievable iceberg ... Whitfield... writes with brilliantly descriptive, and often tendentious eloquence.
A highly readable and perceptive account of how contemporary art is bought and sold ... Whitfield is a sympathetic narrator, and his book is written in a spirit not so much of recrimination as regret for the actions of his erstwhile friend and partner.
Whitfield’s careful explanation of how it happened, with details gleaned from the numerous documents Philbrick sends him from Vanuatu, is incredibly stressful to read. But it does also raise some fascinating questions about how such activity is positively nurtured by the world in which Philbrick was operating ... Whitfield writes beguilingly and amusingly, enhanced by an art dealer’s eye ... What Whitfield doesn’t do is convincingly explain Philbrick’s appeal.
The glorious mystery of the artistic process is not the main focus and the tabloid-style art world revelations have been made so many times they’re as scintillating as flat champagne ... It’s all a bit tawdry. It has the effect of making the art world, once so exciting, seem dilettantish and passé.
