NEW YORK, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- Just weeks after Kim Kardashian's much-discussed nude photo shoot for Paper magazine, Madonna appears topless in this month's issue of Interview.
The 56-year-old performer was photographed by industry legends Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot and interviewed by popular magician David Blain. She's clothed in most of the images, wearing low-cut bustiers, corsets and tights. In one NSFW photograph, she bares her breasts beneath an open cardigan.
"I mean, I tried everything once," Madonna told Blaine of her experience with drugs. "But as soon as I was high, I spent my time drinking tons of water to get it out of my system. As soon as I was high, I was obsessed with flushing it out of me. I was like, Okay, I'm done now."
She also discusses the loss of her mother, Madonna Louise Ciccone, who died of breast cancer when her daughter was five years old.
"I became very obsessed with death, and the idea that you never know when death will arrive, so one has to do as much as possible all the time to get the most out of life," she says. "And death was a big part of my life growing up. I went to lots of funerals."
Blaine, who once spent 44 days enclosed in a box, asked Madonna how she would feel about a similar undertaking.
"I think I would really enjoy it, stillness and quiet, because I feel like people are always talking to me, at me, asking things, questioning me, wanting information, work, music, loud noises, children -- it's endless," she said. "So the idea of a whole day of silence sounds very seductive to me."
The "Like A Prayer" singer also described her artistic influences as a young dancer in New York City.
I remember having conversations with Keith [Haring] and with Jean-Michel Basquiat about the importance of your art being accessible to people. That was their big thing—it should be available to everyone. It was so important for Keith to be able to draw on subways and walls. And Basquiat used to say to me, "You're so lucky that you make music, because music comes out of radios everywhere." He thought that what I did was more pop, more connected to pop culture than what he did. Little did he know that his art would become pop culture. But it's not like we really had discussions about the meaning of art. I remember hearing them talk about those things.
