Prior to the proliferation of feminist performance art — begun half a century ago and continuing today — the presence of a naked female body in artistic media connoted a kind of shorthand. Naked women in paintings and movies were typically offered to convey a very limited range of concepts — innocence, corruption, vulnerability and sexual availability chief among them. Artists like Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneemann exploded that vocabulary. Artistic nudity came to signify nothing, and everything. What this means is that in 2016, when bluegrass and folk artist Sarah Jarosz releases a video for her potent new single "House of Mercy" featuring many stylized images of her own bare skin, she is not limited in the story she's trying to tell. Her only irrefutable message is that now she's got literal skin in the game.
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