On a bright August day last year in Oslo, two masked men, one with a gun,
stormed the galleries at the Munch Museum. As security cameras rolled, they made
off with two paintings. Outside the museum, a bystander with a video camera
filmed the two thieves cracking open the frames, then pitching the canvases into
the back of a black Audi. The pair drove off with Edvard Munch’s The Scream and
Madonna, and the priceless works have not been seen since.  To remedy its
porous security, the Munch Museum will spend nearly $8 million this year on
metal detectors, improved video surveillance and other physical measures to
ensure such a theft will not happen again. On an international level, another
security tactic, however, is quickly becoming the tool of choice to protect
high-value art: the database.
With the advent of the Internet, a number of
countries sponsored art theft databases—as well as all-encompassing
international databases—in the late 1980s and early ’90s. These databases are
online catalogs containing photographs and information on stolen artwork.
Increasingly, art dealers, gallery owners, auction houses and museum personnel
use them to determine if a work appearing in the bona fide art market has been
stolen. The London-based Art Loss Register, Interpol’s art theft database
and Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Intelligence Focus (formerly the Art &
Antiquities Unit) database make up the holy trinity of art-theft information
sources. In fact, the Intelligence Focus plans to put its entire database online
in the coming year so that the general public might also be on the lookout for
stolen property.
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