What’s Good now?

Another batch of hot off the chat recommendations to sink your teeth into; suggestions of what to read, watch, see and listen to from both Darklight Art and our international community of art and photography fanatics. 

Performance Anxiety: Will We Ever Meet the Real Julia Fox? Elephant Magazine (2022)
[Art]

This piece interrogates the notion of person as performance, the way “performance art” has become a synonym for “very public person does some batshit stuff”, and [contentiously? you tell us] places Julia Fox in the canon of credible celebrity artists who’ve got tongues wagging.

Look out for: Fox’s fashion and beauty choices are art in themselves

The Lives of the Muses, Francine Prose (2002)
[Biographical, art, photography]

A deep dive into the artist/muse relationship in all its many guises, as told through the examination of nine women and the roles they played as muses to male artists, creators, writers and thinkers throughout history. 

Look out for: Some bizarre diet manipulation, my dream moniker “Surrealist gypsy sex goddess”

Caravaggio (1986)
[Biographical, art]

More of a series of stunning vignettes than a chronological biopic, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio is one of those films that, frame for frame, looks like a painting. Everyone is young and beautiful and glowing with sweat, and if you’ve ever stood in front of a Caravaggio painting you’ll be transported right there again.

Look out for: The wide selection of regional British accents even though all the characters are Italian, the sound of car horns, interiors inspo

Carrington (1995)
[Biographical, art]

This film is VERY good; a master of the horny cottagecore genre. The Bloomsbury Set prove the power that creative communities have to unlock unconventional yet tender interpersonal dynamics and relationships. Dora Carrington is a truly underrated painter.

Look out for: A lovely dance scene, a delightful pink room, Penelope Wilton in one of her more eccentric roles

David Bailey, Desert Island Discs (1991)
[Photography, documentary, biographical]

According to this interview with Sue Lawley, David Bailey hopes to do some of his best work in his 90s – he’s not quite there yet, at only a modest 84 years old, but what do we think? Is Bailey too much associated with setting the visual language of the Swinging 60s to ever truly progress artistically? Or has he?  

Look out for: Conversations about creativity in relation to age/class/money. The safety of nostalgia. Good and surprising music taste