DUBAI: US pop star Demi Lovato faced criticism this week for sharing videos of Egyptian artifacts that she bought, but which experts now say may be fakes.
In the now-expired clips on her Instagram stories, Lovato told her fans: “I’m so excited, some really incredible things came in the mail today. These are ancient Egyptian artifacts.”
“Some of these pieces are literally thousands of years old,” she added as she shared the authentication certificates of the antiques with her 127 million followers.
However, archaeologist Peter Campbell was unconvinced.
The cultural heritage lecturer at Cranfield University in England took to Twitter to write: “I have never seen provenance like this. None of the critical information is included. Were these exported in 1869 or last year? Where are the copies of the export permits? Who owned them previously?”
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Campbell said that when he first saw the certificates, he thought “it was a joke because they contain none of the critical information like ownership history, export permits or findspot.”
An art crime professor in New York, Erin Thompson, said on Twitter that the music sensation “is showing off getting extremely bad fake Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern antiquities.”
“I mean, who wouldn’t trust a ‘certificate of authenticity’ with the wrong dates from a website designed on MS paint that boasts its wares are ‘in tact’?” read Thompson’s thread.
Thompson also highlighted that such tablets could have possibly “been looted from Iraq, to support insurgent groups like ISIS.”