What is “good taste” anyway? Allow your favorite actor, musician, celebrity, or comedian to let you in on what they’re watching, reading, and consuming.
Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images, Shutterstock, J Vineyards & Winery, Retailers
A few weeks ago, the artist Alexandra Grant posed this question to a roomful of writers, wine connoisseurs, and assorted art types at the studio she has been renting in Chelsea: “What happens when the mantra works?”
Among the many paintings behind her was one with a phrase she has long used in her work: “I was born to love, not to hate.” Ahead of her was a table with bottles of LOVE Wine, a sparkling collaboration she recently struck with the California-based J Vineyards. And tucked away in a side room were shelves of thoughtfully designed art books published by X Artists’ Books, the small press she founded with Keanu Reeves, her romantic and business partner. Each of these facets of Grant’s work are currently facing that existential question in all its dizzying thrills.
First, the paintings. As Grant told The Cut, she had started leaning on that defiant mantra, taken from Sophocles’s Antigone, in the wake of Michael Brown’s 2014 killing in Ferguson, Missouri, which internationally mobilized the Black Lives Matter movement. Grant, who has always dealt with heady, academic topics through often text-heavy work, now feels she has come to exemplify its message through other expressions. “The paintings are effervescent,” she said of her brightly dotted artwork. “You almost can’t read the text anymore. It stopped being the mantra you repeat; it’s already embodied.”
One of those expressions is grantLOVE, a project she began in 2008 to raise money for art nonprofits. It’s through this branch of her work that she launched LOVE Wine, which will feature a label created by a female-identifying artist with each new bottling, beginning with Genevieve Gaignard. (Grant announced that night that they’d just sold out of this initial edition, though another will follow in 2026 with a different artist’s label.)
Grant wasn’t able to properly toast that achievement that night, just having beaten a slight cold. Later that evening, she got a call from Reeves: He’d come down with food poisoning and had to call out of his performance in Waiting for Godot during intermission. (His understudy, Franklin Bongjio, was excellent.) The two met in 2009, bonding over their love of books and establishing a literary friendship and, in 2017, X Artists’ Press. Grant is proud of their esoteric printings, but another mantra question remains: How do you celebrate, and move forward, once your dreams come true?
For Grant, who grew up all around the world thanks to her parents’ globe-trotting careers, this means a gentle “sunsetting” from overseeing the press, though she’s far from calling it quits. Here, she tells The Cut about her taste in the finer things: wine, literature, and Miyazaki.
I know you spend a lot of time in France; what’s your sparkling habit like over there?
There are so many local options, so I love a Crémant; I love a sparkling Vouvray. But I think what I like about J Vineyards is that it’s local. You ask J’s head winemaker, Nicole Hitchcock, where the grapes come from, and she’s like, Oh, the field over there, facing the ocean. I think that idea of terroir kind of has gotten lost, but it’s being refound in American wines. Growing up in France and then learning about wines in the States, people say they like Cabernet, and I’m like, But that’s a grape, that’s not a location. It took me a minute to understand that, in the United States, people choose based on grape rather than terroir.
Do you stick with a sparkling wine throughout a meal, or is there a time to switch?
Not that I want to bring menopause into every conversation I have, but I think it’s important. I grew up with the idea that you would have a glass of wine or a kir as an aperitif, and then you’d pair the meal with a different wine. As I’ve gotten older, I realize that I just enjoy sparkling the whole meal, but it has to do with body chemistry. It turns out that when your hormones shift, you have different needs in terms of food, so a lot of women find that their diets shift spectacularly in their 50s. And it’s not just hangovers! But I will say I do enjoy sparkling more than I used to. I think sparkling and Champagne are actually the lightest energy; the least hungover and you’re not mixing all these different things.
How do you keep your creativity alive when not painting or working on the press?
When you’re living in a city for a long time, sometimes I think, What would a tourist do? I have Chelsea Piers near the studio, and I saw that there’s an ice-skating rink, so I’m learning how to ice-skate. Ice-skating is really bilateral; it’s hard. I’m a huge fan of dance music and power ballads, so being out there skating to Sia at least once a week, and being not good at something, is really important. I like learning something where one is not an expert. I have the most amazing teacher, her name is Zoe on Ice; that’s her Instagram handle. She’s from Alaska, and she just graduated with a master’s degree from the ITP program at NYU. We talk about ideas, and then she’s like, Okay, now we’re gonna learn bunny hops, and I’m 52 years old with sparkling leg warmers. You know what I mean? It’s that idea of cultivating a space of childlike curiosity.
What are you reading right now?
I just finished and am in love with The Bridge of the Golden Horn, by Emine Ozdama, a Turkish writer living in Germany. It’s really extraordinary. At 18, she went to Germany from Turkey to work at a factory and started entering the world of theater and literature and writing about the experiences of being a guest laborer. I’m doing a show at the Neues Museum in Nuremberg in July, and I’m building an octagon-shaped chapel where I’ll feature eight different women who are either German writers or writing in German to talk about how women have used literature to constitute their sense of self since.
Do you like to have multiple books going on at once?
I am one of those people who really thinks of books as furniture. I have manuscripts open on my computer and piles of books started everywhere. There’s a lot of reading going on at the same time. I’m also reading Tehrangeles, by Porochista Khakpour, who is an amazing Iranian American writer from L.A. who lives in New York. Her book is this complete froth about a Persian family in L.A. who’s going to have a reality-TV show, and then the pandemic hits. She’s a very serious person, but she’s written this utter bit of candy, so anytime I need candy, I just reach for the book. You can only read so much theory, for example, right? You need something else.
What’s one book you could point to for someone who wants to get into, let’s say, art theory?
There are so many primers to art theory, but my personal passion is the writer Hélène Cixous — this lioness of French literature. The art world is a world that teaches you through the ear: This is important and this is why. Then you have to memorize; you don’t learn to trust your eyes, you learn to trust your ears. Why is this important? Because I’ve been told it’s important. So I divide the art world between eye people and ear people, and, for me, the most important theorists are the ones who teach you to use your eyes. Hélène’s Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing is such an exciting book because it teaches you to think for yourself.
What’s the last meal you cooked for dinner?
Last night, I cooked pasta with fra diavolo sauce. I wish I could say I made it from scratch, but I bought an excellent jar.
In cases like that, do you pair wine with your meal?
When you’re planning a meal where you’re choosing to drink alcohol, of course you’re going to think about pairing. The great thing about sparkling wine is that it goes well with everything.
What music do you listen to when you’re alone?
I do a lot of work in classical music. Right now, I’m doing album covers for Deutsche Grammophon’s Peter and the Wolf and Romeo and Juliet, so I’m listening to the music that I need to know for these albums. You know how in the wine world they’re like, The University of Bordeaux has said that drinking a glass of red wine every day is good for your health? I read somewhere that EDM is good for your health, which … But I do believe it’s true, that music with a good beat is good for you. I had an intern a few years ago who summed it up for her mother, saying, I love working for Alexandra, we just listen to house music and make dots.
Is there any pop release that’s really stuck out to you this year?
I’m such a huge fan of Rosalía, which, like, is that pop? I love Billie Eilish. I’m a huge Sia fan. I will say one of the highlights of this year was when I went to the last concert of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour with my friend Roxane Gay. That was … I mean, are you kidding me? Destiny’s Child came out, Jay-Z popped out of the floor, Shaboozey was there. It was awesome, that idea of community and safety, seeing everyone decked out. I just could not get enough of the joy and the time and care people had taken.
Do you have a favorite piece of art that you own?
One of my favorite artists is R.B. Kitaj. I have this print that I brought from L.A. that was given by Kitaj to a friend who’s very dear to me, so it has her name on it, and then she gave me the piece. The idea of chains of friendship, I think, is so important in art. I’d say that all of my favorite pieces are connected to real people. When I was 18, I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw Kitaj’s work, and it was the first time that I understood that an artist, a painter, wasn’t just someone who was moving material around, but they were painting about ideas that were literary and personal. That was such a moment of clarity for me. And then I wrote him a fan letter, and he wrote me back. So there’s also that connection to the kindness that I was shown by him as a teenager.
Speaking of chains of friendship, is there anyone or anywhere that you turn to for culture recommendations?
It’s always fascinated me, as the digital distribution of ideas has increased, how do you keep your integrity? I think The Cut is one of the publications that’s really grappled with who we are as humans. We are inclusive, we don’t want to be bossed around, and we wanna be kind of messy and nonhierarchical in our interests. I feel like the writers who’ve written there are also looking outside. I love astrology, so I look at Chani Nicholas. I love my dear Roxane Gay; I’m very interested in what she’s doing. The phrase that keeps coming back to me is: I’m less interested in the world and I’m more interested by the earth. The world of people, because people are being manipulated and hypnotized and distracted, can be very exhausting. I like the idea of returning to the earth — looking at a plant, looking at the sky, this light right here and how amazing it is — and thinking about the writers and artists who are doing that.
We haven’t talked about movies. Is there something that you’ll never, ever watch, no matter how hard people around you may try?
I am not a huge fan of horror. Also, I find that the fascination with serial killers is very problematic to me. Someone in my family was murdered by a serial killer, and being on the family side of it has made it really questionable; the moral or the ethical responsibility of the media in telling these stories with adulation toward the criminal. I think we should investigate society’s desire for that.
Do you have a comfort rewatch?
When I had super-COVID, the only thing I could watch was Miyazaki. I will throw down for this; I have two favorite Miyazakis: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Howl’s Moving Castle. I grew up watching Heidi in Spanish; it’s a Japanese version of a Swiss story dubbed into Spanish that was huge in Mexico when I was a kid. So it’s an aesthetic I grew up with. I also think of the idea of a strong female protagonist, and just the complexity of the stories. Miyazaki’s work looks at the rise of industrial civilization and the minimization of human experience, and then uses the symbolism of magic and nature in order to rebalance things out and help us understand our experience. That’s why I find it so comforting.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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