The shortest version of the story is this: in 2022 I went to Venice for two months, and for most of the trip I was quite sad, and very lonely, and so I spent a lot of time looking at art. I had nothing else to do.
Though I didn’t realise it at first, I went back to London a changed woman. Suddenly, I found myself in frequent need of art. I’d always enjoyed the occasional exhibition, but this was different. Somehow, art had become necessary to me, and so I fed my obsession as often as I could.
Galleries didn’t always make it easy; they’re so often intimidating, and obviously aimed at people who aren’t me. There’s something quite secretive about them, if you’re a keen enthusiast but don’t really know what you’re doing. Still, I persisted. I looked at a lot of art and some of it was good and a lot of it was bad, or I didn’t get it, or both.
In 2023, I moved into a bigger and nicer flat and thought I ought to get some nice pieces for my walls, but obviously I couldn’t afford any of the stuff I’d seen in Mayfair. I’d never even glanced at any of their price lists.
Instead, I spent an unreasonable amount of time online, scouring the internet for young artists who may consider parting with some of their pieces for an amount of money that didn’t feel wholly insane to me. I got there in the end, but it took more work than anyone in their right mind would consider putting into such an unessential endeavour.
In the end, it took over two years to bring those two experiences together – the alienation from the art world and the desire to have some nice things to look at in the flat. In a way, I should probably thank Keir Starmer.
I had, for years, secretly been bored of Westminster, but had kept holding on because I thought that perhaps covering a Labour government would be more fulfilling than writing about the dregs of the Conservative party. It’s fair to say I called it wrong. The election came and went and, if anything, my fatigue only grew stronger.
It took a while for me to figure out my next move. Knowing you dislike something is easy; finding something else you’d rather be doing is quite another. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the epiphany came in a familiar place: with a friend, in the pub, after many warm glasses of cheap plonk.
I walked home that evening and my mind was racing. Twenty-four hours later, I’d managed to put my epiphany into words. It would be a quarterly night in London, and it would be aimed at people who want to like art but find the formal art world too hermetic and offputting. It would involve free booze and nice music and it would have a talk from an industry insider, aimed at clever novices. Crucially, it would all be about the art on the walls – original pieces handpicked by me, and which would cost under £500. It would be called… huh. That last part took a while.
I reached out to Michael and Anna with my idea; two friends who ran a temporarily dormant art startup. I just knew I couldn’t do it alone. To my delight, they were interested. Thus the… thing was born. A few more weeks after that, the name finally escaped from the tip of my tongue. The Outsiders Arts Club was born.
This was last August; our first edition was in November. The self-imposed deadline was, in retrospect, half-mad, but I work best under pressure. I ran around London like a headless chicken for weeks, picking artists and finding a suitable venue, then we did our big announcement in October. Tickets sold out in under 24 hours. Clearly we’d hit a nerve.
To say that I had a poor night of sleep on November 24 would be underselling it. Still, we needn’t have worried. The first edition of the OAC went brilliantly, and we sold 16 pieces. The attendees were happy and so were the artists. I was too overwhelmed to feel anything on the night, but I spent the following day on a little cloud.
I got back to work the day after that – I knew the second edition wouldn’t organise itself, and the last thing I wanted was for this to be a one-hit wonder. Amazingly, the tickets for the February edition sold out even quicker; in just over eight hours. We also sold nearly a third of the works we had on show on the night. It went perfectly, absurdly well.
Speaking of which – I’d love to stay and chat, but our next edition is in May, date TBC, and these artists won’t wrangle themselves, so I better run… see you in Vauxhall?
