Chasing Aphrodite Tracks Down Some Kapoor Ballast

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The Chasing Aphrodite blog has a longish post summarising some of the salient issues of the Kapoor case, including listing some of the museums holding material from Kapoor and the attempts of the blog's authors to prise from the tight lips of some of those museums the answers to some pretty simple questions. One of them is New York's metropolitan Museum:

a search of the Met’s online catalog reveals several antiquities from Kapoor that authorities likely will be interested in — none have documented ownership histories dating to 1972, when India began controlling exports of ancient art. Curiously, the Met also has five stone sculptures from Kapoor in its study collection, here and here, for example. They resemble ancient pieces but are labeled by the museum as “20th Century.” All were acquired in 1991. Did the museum acquire these objects from Kapoor, only to discover they were modern forgeries? We’ve asked Holzer for more information.
UPDATE: Harold Holzer tells us, “The group of 20^th-century forgeries was accepted as a gift along with the other Kapoor gifts for our study collection, and always identified as such”. 

I would say the "resemblance to ancient pieces" is pretty superficial, and both illustrated items are horrible, so it is unclear what kind of "study" one could do with them. It remains unexplained therefore why the museum acquired them, but the donor's motive for giving them is more obvious. Having some modern copies of Indian antiquities imported by Kapoor's 'Nimbus' company not only in the local Museum (just down the road from his shop), but also documented on their website was wonderful cover for the alleged plan to import authentic dodgy dugups and knocked/levered-offs camouflaged among replicas, described as such.  Obviously the fact that he was apparently able to get away with it so long shows that his cover worked. Shipment after shipment of "replicas" came to the New York address which served for both his companies, and nobody noticed what was really in them.

'Kapoor Case: Investigation into Stolen Indian Idols Will Test Museum Transparency', Chasing Aphrodite 30.07.2012