Old hippies go one of two ways. Either they wear original Grateful Dead T-shirts and pukka shells and enjoy the odd trip on their motorbike/surfboard/van with a few rumpled dollar bills in their tatty wallet, or they wear original Grateful Dead T-shirts and enjoy the odd trip in their vintage Ferrari Dino that they’ve had converted to run on clean energy. This is the Fin-Tech Guy. An early investor in Apple, he ploughed his carefully accrued dough into various things to “f*ck the system” – a little online book retailer, say, or an app-based banking system. Yes, his hair is shaggy, his clothes look tattered and his skin is more weather-beaten than a piece of driftwood, but, trust us, his bank balance is overflowing. As he drops a few mil on a Warhol for his second chalet in Aspen he says he doesn’t buy to invest, he just buys what he likes. Often what he likes winds up at auction at a price far higher than he originally paid for it. Funny that.

Art and influencing have more things in common than you might think. Some things are suddenly very hot and other things are very not. The Influencer is up to speed with what is hot and although they are very much out of his price bracket (he makes do with vintage exhibition posters instead), he has a knack of making it look as if he is shopping around. You will see him at the Whitney asking his boyfriend to take a few not-so-candid snaps of him posturing next to the debut work of a young artist while announcing, “I’ll take it,” loud enough for everyone to hear. Although he doesn’t know much about art, and certainly nothing about the classics, he can sniff out something cool at a hundred paces and put it on Instagram before you can say selfie. The secret to his success is his left-of-mainstream taste and his fan base, which is big enough to ensure that whatever he posts will catch on as a trend. It’s all smoke and mirrors, sadly, but who cares when you’re getting 2,850 likes per post?

Although he wouldn’t call himself anal-retentive, the Trad Gallerist does admit that he can be a little uptight about his car, house and gallery. If anything is out of place, his body floods with cortisol and he breaks out in hives. The rambunctious child of a Tech Guy once spilled some Châteauneuf du Pape at a private viewing and he had to go into his office to breathe into a paper bag. He follows in a long line of Trad Gallerists, having worked under one before opening his own space on Cork Street, and now he has a space in Shanghai and one in LA, where he struggles with the likes of Fin-Tech Guy. “Why do they dress their walls in this priceless art and their bodies in athleisure?” he wonders while adding up their seven-figure invoice. He thinks galleries that pop up in impromptu spaces are not real galleries and pretends to not understand NFTs, despite deploying his assistant to buy a load of eth and set up a crypto account on the gallery’s behalf, where he has already trebled his investment with some ugly pictures of monkeys. “Art is subjective,” he cries, laughing in a suit he bought in Japan in the 1980s.

He doesn’t own an iron and his hands are rough and dry. His shoes are grubby and his hair is perfectly unbrushed. He has a musky smell and a lovely smile, and when he is not “just going outside” for a rollie, he is standing back, looking at his own art. His girlfriend is there just to make sure that he doesn’t get too flirty with any potential collectors – although, of course, it should be a red flag to them that he is not wearing any socks and earlier he was mistakenly asked to leave by security. His art has made him enough money so far to buy two properties on two continents. It’s got nothing to do with his raw talent though, and everything to do with the calculated research he did into what people want to buy (semi-crudely painted pictures of animals that are big enough, but not too big, and have some sort of epithet daubed on). He likes to attribute his inspirations to long-dead poets and authors, to men of the wild country, explorers and pirates. He likes to imagine himself as an amalgam of these people – a bare-footed buccaneer of the art world, a cultural elitist. But beneath it all, he lives for Love Island and a Deliveroo as much as the next person.

This guy has his finger on the pulse so hard, he feels it before it’s even pulsed. All of the Kardashian clan, the Carter-Knowles and several big-wigs who produced the Marvel Comic Universe franchise all turn to him for advice on what to spend their big bucks on. And he never gets it wrong. Mostly because if he’s buying something on behalf of someone, then it’s hot property. He got into this totally by accident: his first grift was as a DJ, then producer, then he decided that spending other people’s money was way easier and less of a gamble, and here we are. He’s flown around the world from art fair to art fair, and if he knows you, you’re important. If he pretends to know you, you’re relieved and if he blanks you then it’s time to find a new career. His personal style is truly second to none – there was a rumour for a while that he had a second apartment just for his sneaker collection, but the truth is he has a nice passive secondary income from selling them on eBay. Once a grifter, always a grifter.