.ART

Since the launch of .ART General Availability (GA) on 10th May, the museum community on the art world’s exclusive domain has multiplied registering about 50 new names.

.ART museum community, notably institutions as Tate, Louvre, The Georges Pompidou Center, Guggenheim, Moscow Multimedia Art Museum and MAXXI have been joined by Moscow Museum of Modern Art (Russia), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Germany), Heard Museum (US) and many others.

While some aimed to secure their brand names registering a full name match, such as adidamuseum.art or heardmuseum.art, others used acronyms, for example mmoma.art by Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMoMA).

Out of 130 museums that joined .ART so far, about 40 domain names were purchased containing the word “museum”. A popular example of these URL registrations has been generic name combinations, like textmuseum.art, minimuseum.art and videomuseum.art.

Museums have also been booking individual online “social graphs” registering several names related to their key people or activities. Thus, Fondation Beyeler, a .ART Early Adopter, who had activated fondationbeyeler.art earlier this year, secured 36 more new .ART URLs, MMoMA – 3 names.

Maxxi Museum, the national museum of contemporary art and architecture in Rome, recently switched to maxxi.art completely, sharing in its release, that “The choice to move from a national domain to a clearly supranational one emphasizes the will of the institution to show itself as a global subject, in the belief that culture is something collective, shared and transcultural.”

“As more museums are joining, .ART will collaborate with them to invent new digital services to promote exiting collections, display digital art and create museum-level projects in a relatively new field of Art+Tech”, says Ulvi Kasimov, .ART founder and venture investor.