From Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, which was published last month by ZE Books.

The museums of New York in the Seventies and Eighties were as much the domain of my semi-feral childhood as the Automats and the soda counters and the used-book stores and Washington Square Park. I grew up going to the Museum of Natural History every year—it was a pro forma class trip for a public school kid, even one from Brooklyn. My father was a painter, so if we hit the museums uptown instead of the SoHo galleries, it was MoMA, the Whitney,…