Nudity has never seemed to bother Grace Jones. Her art has thrived, in part, on a physical candor that both shocked people and redrew the boundaries of taste, beauty, and eroticism around her masculinity, ebony skin, and unrelenting intensity.
Interpretation
Grace Jones embraces her nudity as a form of artistic expression that challenges conventional beauty standards.
The quote highlights Grace Jones's boldness in using her body and nudity as a canvas for her art, which not only provokes but also expands the societal norms surrounding beauty and eroticism. Her unique identity and fierce presence disrupt traditional perceptions, inviting discussions around masculinity, race, and intensity in art.
In practice
A discussion on the impact of Grace Jones in a gallery opening.
You didn't have to read 'Playboy,' visit the mansion, wear pajamas, or even be straight: The effects of its ideas about women on the American psyche were totalizing. Women were inferior to men because, for 'Playboy,' they were scenery - pretty, passive, usually white, often blonde, there.
Movies and television have a way of using a soundtrack not just to create a mood but to literalize it. You could always count on a master class in splitting the difference between artistry and obviousness during the so-called Blaxploitation era.
One result of moviemaking - and a side effect of moviegoing - is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors.
There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.
I wanted to be a scientist. I did a thesis on lions. But I realised photography can show things writing can't. Lions were my professor of photography.
What we [writers] do might be done in solitude and with great desperation, but it tends to produce exactly the opposite. It tends to produce community and in many people hope and joy.
Is he on his horse? O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!
You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.
A person who's only suffering can't write a poem. There are choices to be made, and you need to be objective.
Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.