This year we launched our online community space What’s Good, a place to chat, share ideas, and exchange recommendations on all things art and photography.
What’s Good highlights non-pretentious content for the art and photography lover, curated by Darklight Art and seen by you every week via WhatsApp. Our recommendations are a real mixture, high and low, trash [not really] and treasure, some new and some archival. There’s no need to have an MA in Art History & Theory to join the conversation, art is for everyone.
If you’re not up for a chat but still want the best suggestions for what to read, watch, listen and go to, that’s okay too. We’ll be sharing recommendations from us and our audience right here on the Darklight Art platform, so you can check in, then check out.
Here’s what we’ve been enjoying so far.
*** Darklight Art recommends
WATCH THIS
*** Ways of Seeing [1972]
[Documentary, theory, art history, advertising, photography]
John Berger’s seminal BBC series turned fifty this year, but the message hasn’t aged a day. It’s the perfect time to rewatch, and you can do it on YouTube for zero pounds.
Look out for: Berger’s jazzy wardrobe, some profound feminism
LA Originals [2020]
[documentary, art]
TikTok account: piglet788z
[design, history]
*** Love is The Devil [1998]
[biographical, art]
What LOOKS like a Francis Bacon painting and FEELS like a Francis Bacon Painting but in fact ISN’T a Francis Bacon painting [because it’s actually a movie]? The answer is Love is the Devil by John Maybury, which is so fantastically sensitive in its handling and understanding of Bacon’s work that it is almost disarming.
Look out for: a hundred subtle Bacon references; naked lightbulbs, mirror triptyques, open mouth.
*** The Andy Warhol Diaries [2022]
[documentary, biographical, history, art]
READ THIS
*** Just Kids, Patti Smith [2010]
[Biographical, art]
A beautiful story of the relationship between Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. A profound portrait of the love, friendship and inspiration between two young artists in 1960’s New York. It’s the ultimate love story which ends as an elegy.
Look out for: creative glitterati name drops; Warhol, Gibsbery, Jim Morrison and New York’s OG hot spots: Coney Island, Chelsea Hotel and Max’s Kansas City
Doomed ship of gold’s ghostly picture gallery is plucked from the seabed, The Guardian [2022]
[Reporting, history, photography]
LISTEN TO THIS
This recommendation serves double duty; the podcast is a fantastic listen obviously, but if you’re not following both Emily and host Gem Fletcher on Instagram then you need to get. on. it.
Look out for: chilling indictments of the bloody state of it all
8Ball 003: Josh Citarella & Channel [2022]
[Reporting, media, photography]
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