NY Times Provides Nice Little Exercise on Unjust Enrichment

According to the New York Times, A man claiming to be a property owner, Nate, offers an artist cash to paint a Soviet-style mural of the Cookie Monster (pictured in his pre-Soviet days at left) on a building in Peoria.  The artist performs, employing up to ten people on the project, and he is so pleased with the results, he posts pictures of the finished product on Facebook. 

A week after the mural went up, the real owner turned up.  Before you say that C is for quasi-Contract, consider the possibility that C is for offiCious intermeddler.  The owner quickly whitewashed the mural, and then he turned on his midwestern-ordinary-guy quote generator:

“This isn’t news,” Mr. Comte said, then added an expletive. “I’ll give you a headline: Man paints his own building wall.”

“I don’t hate art,” he earlier told The Journal Star of Peoria. “But I don’t know what the hell that was.”

The identity of the Soviet-style Cookie Monster enthusiast remains a mystery.  Let us hope it remains so.  Sometimes, we should resist the temptation to see behind the curtain.

As a public service, we suggest tweaking reality into a hypo.  What if the fake Nate paid an advance sufficient to pay for supplies but promised to pay the rest upon completion and never paid.  Can the innocent painter recover from the real Nate in quantum meruit?