Most art prizes worth $50,000 charge to enter, want a curated portfolio in a specific format, and take a month of your life to apply for. This one is free, and the application is a link.
The details
- Deadline: 1 November 2026
- Prize pool: more than USD $50,000 in total value, across nine prizes (four of them newly added this year)
- Free to enter — no submission fee
- Eligibility: artists and collectives 18 and over, anywhere in the world, in any medium — painting, sculpture, performance, video, installation and digital practice all explicitly included
- Timeline: semi-finalists announced 6 November, finalists 20 November, winners revealed during Art Basel Miami on 3 December
The unusual part
The award departs from the standard open-call format. You don’t upload a portfolio. Instead, each artist submits the URL of a .ART domain they own, pointing at wherever their practice already lives online.
That is a genuinely interesting premise. It judges your work as you actually present it — your real site, your real sequencing, your real writing about it — rather than ten JPEGs stripped of context and jammed into a submission portal. For anyone whose practice is web-native, time-based or interactive, that’s a much fairer surface than a PDF.
It also means the thing being assessed is partly how you present yourself online, which is a real skill and not the same skill as making the work. Worth knowing before you enter.
Be clear about the requirement
You must own a .ART domain. That is the mechanism, and .ART is the registry running the award.
So “free to enter” is accurate about the submission and incomplete about the cost. A .ART domain is an annual registration fee — not expensive, in the usual range for a specialty TLD, but not zero, and it’s a recurring cost if you keep it. If you already own one, this is a genuinely free shot at a substantial prize. If you don’t, price the domain first and treat that as the entry fee, because functionally it is one.
That’s not a criticism of the award so much as a description of its business model: a registry running a well-funded prize that requires its product. Plenty of prizes are more extractive and less honest about it.
Worth it?
For a web-native practice, probably yes. The deadline is five weeks out, the work is in presenting a site you may already have, and the finalist announcements land in a high-visibility window around Art Basel Miami — which is worth something independent of the money, since prize shortlists are how a lot of curators find people.
For an artist whose work doesn’t live online in any meaningful way, this is the wrong call to chase. Building a website to enter a competition is the tail wagging the dog.