Calling all art world outsiders 🚨

Wednesday 19 August 2026

What’s happening in museums, galleries, art and heritage

Scroll for: Take Five Hundred ✍️ | Hot List 🔥

Happy Wednesday.

It’s mid-week, and it’s a guest column edition.

Ever found commercial art galleries intimidating, secretive and off-putting? You’re not alone, as shown by the hundreds of people who have been flocking to a new quarterly London event that’s positioning itself as the antithesis to the ‘insider’ art world. In today’s Take Five Hundred, journalist and Outsider Arts Club founder Marie Le Conte explains why she’s on a mission to transform art viewing and buying into a sociable event (that won’t break the bank).

And on the Hot List, see my pick of five cultural offerings you should be diving into this week — including a major new BBC series on art dealing, and the UK’s largest annual festival of visual art.

Unfortunately there’ll be no news digest this Friday, so I’ll see you back in your inbox next week.

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An opinion column — in 500 words — by a guest writer.

Marie Le Conte | Journalist and founder of Outsiders Arts Club

I worked as a political journalist for a decade and I tried my hardest to make a weird, occasionally off-putting and often daunting world accessible to outsiders. It was fun and challenging but I eventually tired of it and, last year, felt I needed to broaden my horizons. Art felt like an obvious next step.

I’d turned up in Westminster one day like a friendly, insistent stray cat, and so I decided to try something similar here with art. I’ve no formal training but had already spent around one million hours loitering around various exhibitions. It was my favourite hobby but one which I recognised wasn’t for everyone: galleries can so often feel intimidating, and the people who work in them can’t always be relied on to be friendly, or even approachable.

The Outsiders Arts Club, which I ended up launching last November with two friends, tries to offer a different approach.

If you turn up to one of our pop-up nights at the Handbag Factory in Vauxhall, you’ll be welcomed in with a free beer or glass of wine. The playlist will be fun, and the talk, given by a different art world insider each time, will never last for more than ten minutes.

It will also always be followed by our “no stupid questions” Q&A, in which we encourage people to email us their queries in advance then ask their questions anonymously on their behalf, no matter how small or candid. We want you to have a good time, and recognise that feeling overly self-conscious may not help with that.

Crucially, we also want you to think about starting your own collection, by hopefully buying one of the pieces we selected for you.

On the walls at each club event are around 50 pieces by between 15 and 20 interesting, exciting artists. Some of them are freshly out of art school while others are in their sixties and picked up their brushes in middle-age. The only thing their works have in common is that they’re brilliant paintings, collages or works on paper, and all cost between £200 and £500.

Over the first four editions, we’ve welcomed over 350 people through our doors and sold them over 60 pieces. Some had clearly bought before and strode in within minutes of us opening, picking a piece before we’d even handed them a drink; others needed a chat and a nudge from us, but ended up bringing their first ever piece home at the end of the night.

Still, our greatest achievement probably came when quite a prominent person from the industry told us, with genuine surprise on their face, that they’d never really seen this many normal people in an art gallery. It felt like a real victory, and a sign we’d done something right.

Few things are as joyous as encountering a piece of art that genuinely speaks to you and deciding to bring it into your home. Why shouldn’t more people get to experience it for themselves?

• The next Outsiders Arts Club will be on 15 September at the Handbag Factory in Vauxhall. Buy tickets here
  

• Marie Le Conte is a French-Moroccan freelance journalist and art dealer living in London. She’s written for most national publications, from Vogue and the Guardian to GQ and the Financial Times

My curated round-up of what’s NEW to see, do, watch, read and more.

*I will earn a small commission — at no extra cost to you — when purchasing through some links in this section

TV SERIES
1. 🔵 The Big Deal With Steph McGovern
BBC One, Thursdays 20:00 + BBC iPlayer

This show is “like The Apprentice for the art world” according to host Steph McGovern. Seven pairs of trainee art dealers from around the UK put their creativity, negotiating and profit-making skills to the test in the highly competitive art world. The first episode is all about graduate art.

🔗 Watch the first episode here

📺 WATCH | Steph McGovern interviewed on This Morning about The Big Deal

FESTIVAL
2. 🔵 Edinburgh Art Festival 2026
Various venues, Edinburgh 🇬🇧 | Now open — until

Although it’s billed as the UK’s largest annual festival of visual art, it’s somewhat easy to forget the Scottish capital has this three-week arts celebration every August, as it sits alongside the juggernaut that is the Fringe. This year sees 40 venues involved, with shows on Eva Rothschild and Catherine Opie.

🔗 Discover more

BOOK
3. 🔵 Ink Paper Chisel Grain: A Remarkable History of Woodcuts
By Paul Coldwell | Published on 20 August by Michael Joseph

Some of the most powerful images in human history have come from the humble woodcut print technique — and this new book examines why. Part history, part travelogue, part meditation on making, readers are guided through five centuries — from Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic visions to the monumental works of William Kentridge.

🔗 Pre-order your copy (and save 5%)

🔗 Find out more

BOOK
5. 🔵 The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool
by James Cahill | Published on 27 August by Thames & Hudson

Dive into 1960s California through the eyes of youthful artist David Hockney and the woman who would become his muse, enigmatic socialite Betty Freeman. The FT describes the book as “part forensic pictorial analysis, part character study of the artist and one of his sitters.”

🔗 Pre-order your copy now

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