I adore this time of year. It’s freezing, and the boiler’s having hissy fits, but there’s something magical about wrapping up and heading out with friends to a gallery. I think it’s nostalgia – trips with family and grandparents to see sites while everyone’s got time off, interspersed with freezing cold trips on the ferry or the duck busses.
It’s also the time when you’re inadvertently finding moments to consider new year’s resolutions, or littler changes to make to your diaries next year.
So I’m going to focus this on a few suggestions:
- Buy more art
- Worm your way into things
- Engage with studios
- Take leaps into a new part of the art world
The first one is a bit on the nose, but to get you started there is a brief guide to the best artist-led and artist-focussed makers markets and craft fairs through December in these pages. But it’s not just about Christmas. Remember that your world is made better by art. That’s constant. And you, in turn can make the art world better. Seek out new things, new artists, and slowly inspire a return to an art world where buying work is an expected part of it.
It helps artists make a living, and it makes the city a better place to be when, by extension, artists have more money to do exceptional things.
Worm your way into things and places you shouldn’t be. If you’re an artist, get yourself into some nonsensical planning meeting and have a say. Disrupt quietly and gently until you make little waves that do the same as above. If you’re an audience member, find your way into conversations with artists. It might inspire you to stay there.
Equally, engage with studios. That’s as much a prompt to artists and studios themselves as it is to audiences. Studios are the beating heart of the art world. They are mostly run by volunteers, or co-owned by the artists themselves. They’re exciting places to be, but they are often regarded as a staple, which makes us believe they’re in a state of safe permanence. They’re not. For curators, organisers and those with power, make an effort in 2026 to seek out and engage with studios you’re not familiar with. It might change something.
And for everyone, take a leap. Make the next step. It might be taking up a new course, signing up to a workshop you’ve been putting off. It might mean becoming that artist who sends fifty emails a day to see which one lands. Whatever your relationship to the art world, seek to deepen it in 2026.
And yes that started to sound like a horoscope towards the end. Yes, I’ve been reading too many tarot predictions for the week ahead. But being part of the art world isn’t supplementary to a good life, it’s essential to it.
