You can’t beat art documentaries for sheer relatability. Watch the artists work, watch them succeed or fail, and then listen to their friends sort through the details. The list that follows is hardly an exhaustive introduction to the genre, but it’s a good batch of films guaranteed to transport you out of your living room, whether it’s to the glamour of the Mediterranean coast, to the excitement of a contemporary art auction, to the otherworldly ecstasy of a Sun Ra concert, or even to the squalid claustrophobia of Edvard Munch’s Norwegian adolescence.

‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972)

We’ve been coming to terms with technology’s effect on art for more than a century, and the issue seems particularly salient now that we are depending on the internet for all of our social and aesthetic needs. But there’s still no better guide to the way modernity has upended our experience of the world than the critic, novelist and screenwriter John Berger in his groundbreaking 1972 BBC series.

Watch all four episodes on YouTube.