God Is Great

摘要

It's hard to know when art maven and real estate investor Nasser David Khalili first felt a craving for legitimacy. Could it have been when his teacher at a Jewish day school in Tehran, Iran ridiculed and flunked him for aspiring to genius? "I was outspoken, and 1 wanted to prove my teacher wrong," Khalili today recalls. So, to that end, he wrote and published at age 14 a book ranking 233 world geniuses. Or was it later, after he had purchased from a trusted London dealer an $86,000 bird-shaped ceramic sculpture from Raqqa, Syria (circa 1250)? Although the object came with a certificate of authenticity from Oxford University art historians, Khalili had a different set of dons reexamine the object, this time using samples taken from anywhere except its base. The sculpture turned out to be a fake. Con artists "took the old bottom and attached a new part on top," he says, eyes squinted.