Holly Willats started Art Licks in January 2010 as a website — a simple events listing for the kind of art happening in London that had no marketing budget and no press office. The exhibitions in converted shopfronts, the performances in warehouse basements, the open studios in buildings scheduled for demolition: this was the grassroots ecology of British contemporary art, and almost nobody was documenting it. Willats built a platform that did, offering publicity to events that could not afford their own and acting as a primary information point for audiences who wanted to see what was actually interesting rather than what was officially important.
The printed magazine grew out of that context. Rather than assigning critics to write about emerging artists from the outside, Art Licks asked the artists, curators, and organisers themselves to contribute — to write about what they were doing, thinking, and making. The result was something rare in art publishing: a magazine written by the people behind the happenings rather than about them. This editorial model, which Willats has maintained across more than twenty-seven issues, gives each edition an authenticity and an energy that conventional art magazines struggle to replicate. The writing is not polished in the way that professional criticism is polished. It is better than that: it is direct.
The Art Licks Weekend, an annual festival that brings together artist-led spaces from across the UK for a programme of exhibitions, performances, and open events, has become one of the most important platforms in the British art calendar for grassroots creative activity. Recent issues of the magazine have expanded beyond London, with a trilogy of editions produced from Newcastle, Bristol, and Birmingham — each guest-edited by local practitioners, each offering a specific glimpse into the ways artists in those cities are making it work. The question that runs through every issue is not aesthetic but structural: how do people sustain a creative practice when the funding is scarce, the rent is rising, and the institutions are looking elsewhere?
Art Licks exists because someone recognised that the most vital part of the British art ecosystem is also the most precarious. The magazine, the festival, the commissioning programme — together they form the infrastructure that early-career artists need and almost never get. For many of them, it is the difference between being seen and being invisible.
Explore Art Licks at <a href="https://www.artlicks.com/" target="\_blank">artlicks.com