22. Does Belgium have the best art market in the world?

Once again, very interesting what she has to say.

But does a relationship-driven market, because she talks about the importance of relationships, does it protect collectors or is it actually good for dealers or is it good both ways?

Well, I think one of the interesting points that Ellen actually made in our conversation was that the art world and the art market is always a small world, even just internationally.

When you look at a particular city like Brussels, it really is a very, very small world where everyone knows one another.

Everyone knows one another by first name, almost.

And you cannot... really get away with behaving badly before everyone finds out very, very quickly.

It sounds absolutely as if it's self-policing, but it is small as a result.

One of the things that people I think forget is that Independent, which is a New York art fair, very, very respected, very collector focused.

A few years ago, I think between 2016 and 2018, Independent made the decision to launch their first fair outside of New York and they chose it to be in Brussels.

Well, you can see how this for a fair that was really trying to target collectors.

A city like Brussels is pretty perfect, but it only lasted three years.

And I spoke to someone who said that one of the reasons that it didn't quite work was that in New York, if there is a big society wedding that draws a whole bunch of rich people and there are still more than enough wealthy collectors to prop up an art fair.

But if in a city like Brussels, you have one or two society weddings on the key dates for your fair, then everyone leaves.

There just aren't enough people to hold more than one or two events at the same time.

Awesome.

So I don't think you're ever going to see in Brussels a freeze week where you might have one, two, three, four, five different fairs all happening at the same time and auctions and all of that because it's just not big enough.

And it's sort of one of my conclusions from being there is that really one of the things that is missing is collectors coming from abroad.

Despite the fact that it's the center for the European Commission, that's amazing.

Despite its position, despite the fact that it only takes an hour to Paris, a couple of hours to London, and it's a very international city with lots and lots of different nationalities there, they just can't quite pull people in.

Brussels gets a bit of a bad rap.

Because, look, it's not as pretty as Paris.

It's not as cosmopolitan as London.

The only way to put it, really, is Brussels has pretty bad branding.

I don't know how you feel.

You've sort of traveled through it every so often.