It is only 4 years old, but it is undoubtedly, in principle, the oldest contemporary art fair in the world: Filip Vermeylen, professor of art market history at Erasmus University, of Rotterdam, discovered that, from the XVe and 16e centuries, artists’ wives regularly met near the Antwerp Stock Exchange to sell their husbands’ works! Already at the time, 9% of home owners owned at least one work of art, some accumulating nearly thirty.
A « collectionnite » typically Flemish, whose descendants continue the tradition. This is what prompted the organizers of the contemporary art fair Art Brussels to create a similar event in Antwerp, a city where around forty galleries and places managed by artists are active. With a slight difference, however, which is important: if, in Brussels, the galleries are selected on file, their program for the fair being decisive, and which can if necessary be adapted at the request of the organizers, here, it is useless and vain to apply; they are invited by an ad hoc committee which has, beforehand, studied their journey, or even visited them at their homes or at other fairs.
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