Bull Market: Today's Billionaire Egomaniacs Have Turned the Art World Into a High-Stakes Poker Game -- But the Loss Is Ours

I have been an invited interloper in the fiefdoms of the decimal-pointed rich long enough now to know that when rich men want to distinguish themselves from other rich men they buy art. Among practitioners of modern-day social one-upmanship this is hardly new. The nouveaux riches of the Gilded Age were the first Americans to discover the class-enhancing power of nailing a Titian above the mantel. But those robber barons were different from ours in a very important way: To those less formally edu...