Art Starter: Craig Schuftan

What are you reading at the moment?

I've just started reading Ben Sisario's book on The Pixies' Doolittle. I'm only 20 pages in but I've already learned over a dozen things about this band – one of my favourites – that I never knew. Sisario dives right into the existential horror of songs like Bone Machine, but never shies away from the fact that this terrifying music was put together by outwardly normal people playing unremarkable chords. In other words, he understands that the secret of the Pixies' success has as much to do with normal/weird/normal as with the more famous quiet/loud/quiet.

Who is your favourite author?

Robert Hughes. He was an Australian art writer, TV presenter and historian, who worked for many years as Time magazine's in-house art critic. It's no exaggeration to say that his The Shock of the New changed my life when I read it for the first time in 1991.

What book is your guilty pleasure?

All my books are guilty pleasures because I read them over and over again, and I always hear that voice in the back of my head, you know, the one that says you should be keeping up to date, reading the things you know people will ask you if you've read. And sometimes I do keep up, and I'm always discovering new favourites. But a lot of the time, I just keep reading old ones, twice, three times, sometimes four or five: E.H. Carr, What is History?; Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Herbert Read, To Hell With Culture, Calvin Tompkins, Duchamp, John Cage, Silence. Books like that, I think I could read for the rest of my life and still be surprised every time I pick them up.

What literary character do you relate to the most?

I wish I wasn't, but I'm pretty sure I'm the narrator of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. Always reasoning my way out of doing stuff and being disappointed as a result, trying to console myself by telling myself that I did nothing because I'm smart, but secretly – or not so secretly – wishing I was the kind of person who could act spontaneously, a man of action!

Have you ever read a Mills & Boon book?

No. All those men of action on the covers put me off.

Where did you write the majority of this book?

On a succession of kitchen and dining room tables in a series of apartments situated along the M1 tram line in Berlin, Germany. At a cafe in Sydney with an unopened motel-room style container of jam in front of me and a desultory playlist of early 2000s chill music circulating on the stereo.

What can the audience expect for The Toff in town book launch?

It's a lecture with a soundtrack, about alternative rock in the '90s. It's about why we make music, what rock'n'roll is for, and why it starts out good and ends badly. It features 15 bands, 128 songs, four theories of historical decline and five good reasons why self-expression sucks.