I kind of write about visual art the way Roger Angell writes about baseball, which is to say, you're writing about life: it's a somewhat focused, limited terrain in which you write about everything.

Genetically, I have tons of musical background in my life. My mother's father was a famous Weimar-era composer, Ernst Toch. My father's mother was the head of the Vienna Conservatory's piano department. It all canceled out in my case. I'm completely hopeless in music.

When you're a kid, your first five or six years, you converge all the time. School is about training that out of you, especially universities.