The Getty Kouros

*“One of those two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell of a lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing. Can you feel it? … You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There’s no ‘mystical plasmic presence,’ no ‘aura’ around it.”* —Philip K. Dick, *The Man in the High Castle*
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"If authentic, the kouros is one of the most important works of ancient art to enter the United States since World War II. But it has no documented history, or provenance ... [As] the kouros illustrates, objectivity is a chimera, even in this age of electron microscopy, thermoluminescence and carbon-14 dating."—*[The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/04/arts/art-absolutely-real-absolutely-fake.html),* 1991

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*Statue of a Kouros*
Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery—[The J. Paul Getty Museum](http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=12908)

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