The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has launched a smartphone app for on-the-go access to its National Stolen Art File database. Users can search for stolen works, then share their results or submit tips to the FBI over the phone or electronically, while navigating the aesthetic – and technological – world of a 1990s spy movie.
The app offers 4,522 stolen items that can be searched by subject, medium, or artist. Many works are unphotographed and a simple search returns multiple reproductions of a photo of an empty silver frame. Users can also browse through 21 categories ranging from paintings to guns to masks. An “other” category contains a whopping 1,482 objects, many of which could be sorted into actual groups. For some reason, an entire category is dedicated to the two stolen wine cellars in the database, and eight works do not appear in any category.
In the April 10 ad, FBI Art Crime Agent Colleen Childers said the new program is a push to make the existing database more user-friendly, an aspiration that the app in its current state doesn’t exactly meet. A search for “George Washington” turned up a New England Patriots Super Bowl ring that was tragically described as “Pres. signatures from George Washington to Harding on paper,” with its backing listed as “handwritten.” Additionally, artist seekers for “Vermeer” and “Manet” — two artists whose work was stolen in the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner museum heist — came back empty.
The FBI’s new app may work as a computer science student’s last-minute submission for a project designed to test his ability to sort, but thankfully the international crime-fighting organization Interpol launched a similar application in 2021. It includes US objects and is considerably more advanced. Users can enter very specific information such as signature location and choose from pre-determined topic categories. Vitally, users can also perform reverse image search.
Like the Interpol app, the new FBI program also does not include systematically looted works of art held in held collections and museums. Glamorous art burglaries repeatedly do securitiesbut a lot of FBI recent crises were doctored antiquities. Over the past few years, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has aggressively campaigned against these stolen works, recovering and repatriating thousands of items from institutions. including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. US authorities report having returned 20,000 objects since 2007, but the problem is far from being solved: a International Consortium of Investigative Journalists report last month find over 1,000 smuggler-related artifacts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art alone.
