Can a New Domain Finally Bring the Art World Into the 21st Century?

By investing in the domain, .art, Ulvi Kasimov hopes to bring digital order to a market that can suffer from mystery, forgery, and an aversion to new technological tools.

Featured on bloomberg.com

For $25 million, investor Ulvi Kasimov could have bought a decent Picasso to enjoy—or flip in a few years. Instead the London-based businessman has spent that amount on something much less tangible: an internet domain.

Kasimov’s company, UK Creative Ideas Ltd., outbid nine rivals to win the contract to operate ".art,” a new, top-level domain he hopes will create digital infrastructure for the international art community: individuals, organizations and eventually, art objects. Starting on May 10, when the general availability period begins, anyone will be able to acquire a domain name with an .art extension for as little as $15.

"I am convinced that the future is at the intersection of art, finance and digital space,” Kasimov, 47, said in a recent interview in New York.

The pitch is that .art instantly creates an identity aligned with the art world; you can see plainly why Apple Inc. rushed to register iphone.art and facetime.art, among 36 domain names. During the preferred access period, which launched in December, more than 2,000 domains were purchased on .art by cultural organizations, as well as tech companies, luxury brands and banks. Instagram.art, Rolex.art and Beyonce.art were all snatched up. Ditto: .art domains for the Louvre, Tate and Centre Pompidou. Mega-gallery Hauser and Wirth celebrated its 25th anniversary with a special .art micro-site.

Chinese choreographer and painter Shen Wei said that acquiring shenwei.art allowed him to differentiate from others because his name “is not uncommon in China,” he said in a statement. It also could help you distinguish yourself in the field. "The most common mix-up when Googling my name as an artist is with another artist of the same name who is a photographer,” said Shen.

Is It Necessary?

Not everyone is on board. Mega dealers such as Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner haven’t registered yet. Others, who did buy domains, are unsure they’ll need to use them.

New York’s Metro Pictures Gallery, which represents star artists such as Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, had to buy its current domain name, metropictures.com, from a speculator years ago. So when .art version became available, it pounced, even though it has no immediate plans to switch to the new site. “It seemed like a good thing to do,” said Janelle Reiring, a co-founder of the gallery. “It was a very practical decision.”

The Dash for Domains

Kasimov is part of a hot new trend in the domain universe. Traditional domain extensions—.com or .net—don’t express a personal vision or institutional mission. So when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) launched a special program to expand the domain name system, it received 1,930 applications during a brief window in 2012. More than 1,000 extensions, also known as strings, have been rolled out, resulting in some 28 million new domain names registered worldwide, according to the Domain Name Association.

You will find .law and .bank, as well as .mom and .shop. Some names have sparked bidding wars, selling for millions of dollars at special auctions. For example, .web fetched $135 million at auction, while .vip sold for $3 million, according to ICANN.

“Now you can have meaning on both sides of the dot,” said Jeff Sass, chief marketing officer at .Club Domains LLC, which registered 800,000 domain names in three years. “It’s an important part of your online identity, marketing, and branding because it makes it easier for people to find you.”

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