From the Wool-sack

• Publication year: 1998
• Pages: 25
• Citation: Vol. 27 No. 12 Pg. 25

27 Colo.Law. 25 Colorado Lawyer 1998.

1998, December, Pg. 25. From The Wool-Sack

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25

Vol. 27, No. 12, Pg. 25

The Colorado Lawyer
December 1998
Vol. 27, No. 12 [Page 25]

Departments
From The Wool-Sack
From The Wool-Sack
by Christopher R Brauchli

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Keats, Endymion

What a relief. If only because it would have been so sad to find oneself bilked out of millions of dollars without the thing that caused one to have been bilked to have changed even one iota. What's worse is it proves how little we know. The fear of being bilked is what caused David Paul to become defensive back in 1989 and why the folks at Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Co. of Tokyo are relieved in 1998

It all has to do with beauty. And that, it turns out, has nothing to do with how a thing looks, which is why so many people have spent so much time trying to decide if what they're looking at is what they're looking at

One of the reasons for curiosity as to whether it is what people think it is is that people today are spending a lot more for works of art than they did many years ago. Works of art were once thought to be desirable because of how they looked. If a painting appealed to a viewer and he or she had money, he or she would buy the painting and proudly display it in a suitable place. People in the old days were quite simple. Today, we are sophisticated. We know that whether something is appealing to the eye is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is knowing who created the thing to be acquired

David Paul, the former chairman of Centrust Bank in Florida who in 1995 began serving an eleven-year prison sentence completely unrelated to the fact that he may or may not have had good taste in art, acquired lots of art for his institution before pleading guilty to twenty-nine felony counts resulting from his having pilfered $24 million from his bank. (The guilty plea followed a jury verdict finding him guilty of sixty-eight counts of fraud, conspiracy, and tax offenses.)

Among his acquisitions was a Rubens that he purchased in 1988 for $13.2 million. Dealers and collectors immediately made fun of Mr. Paul, saying he paid anywhere from $7 million to $11 million too much. He retorted by saying that an appraiser whom he refused to identify said the painting was worth more than $18 million. Almost none of the discussion concerned itself with the...