You are ready to buy an African mask, a Hindu statue, a Monet painting—anything characterized as cultural property—but you have questions that go beyond price and condition. Is the item authentic? Are there unresolved concerns related to ownership or provenance? Was the piece looted or stolen from a museum, private owner temple or archaeological site? Finding answers to these and related questions is necessary due diligence.

Art theft is rare, and art heists of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum thefts are even rarer, but it happens. Art buyers’ due diligence should always involve checking databases of stolen art and antiquities, and there are two apps prospective buyers and sellers, as well as dealers and museum curators, can consult when such questions arise.

The newest, created by the FBI, allows users to see if a particular item is listed in the FBI’s National Stolen Art File, but the bureau’s database is, unfortunately, relatively small, with just about 8,000 artworks. Interpol, the French-based international criminal police organization, maintains a much larger database of more than 52,000 reported stolen pieces of cultural property from around the world that can be searched and viewed with its ID-Art app. It uses facial recognition software—point your phone’s camera at a painting at an art fair, an ethnographic object at a museum or even an objet d’art at an open-air market or antique shop, upload your photo to the app and it searches Interpol’s database,........

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