18(a) Describe the mission/purpose of your proposed gTLD

Prototypical answer:

During the past twenty years, audiences for art have grown exponentially in all parts of the world. Now virtually every major city has its own biennial art exhibition, a center for contemporary art, an art academy. Visiting an art exhibition or a museum, once a privilege of the elite few, became a popular activity not only in affluent countries, but also in the developing world. The professional community of people who work in the field of art similarly increased manifold, and what used to be a rarefied profession now includes a multitude of individuals from all parts of the world, who work to produce and present art to global publics. In most cases these publics are not only comprised of families and Sunday patrons, but of a new, rapidly growing number who consider themselves practitioners and arts professionals in their own right—educated in art, invested in the questions art poses to the culture, and desiring the visibility and acknowledgement that can bring their own ideas into the larger discussion.

This fact has made a comprehensive and informative Internet domain dedicated to art—one that can connect and make comprehensible all these far flung activities, practitioners and multilingual, multicultural audiences—an urgent necessity.

For over a decade, the applicant for the .art TLD, e-flux, has been an established authority in the field of art, having provided open and free access to extremely high quality content for the global public and specialized professionals alike. Consequently, it has become a trustworthy key node through which most of the important information about art on the Internet passes. 

The globalization of art, as is shown by the establishment of new museums, organization of exhibitions and the creation of appeal to a global audience also entails that those who are directly or indirectly engaged in art are constantly on the lookout for high quality and genuine information. A truly global identifier, like the .art gTLD, could become a catalyst in serving the global art community to achieve this goal. Considering the fact that traditional media are struggling to obtain art aficionados’ attention, this specialized and focused name space intends to create a new communications channel with respect to art, in particular on the Internet.

With its unique expertise in the historical and contemporary development of art gained through years of collaboration with thousands of practitioners, institutions, and publications in virtually all parts of the world, e-flux plans to bring this unique knowledge to the .art top-level domain. e-flux envisions this new space as a reliable, ethical, selective, and educational resource for art professionals, educators, institutions, and especially the public at large.

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