In an interview with independent art writer, curator and index Magazine founder Bob Nickas, Neo-Victorian time traveler David McDermott pictured himself and collaborator Peter McGough as “decorative oddities” — not so much accepted as tolerated in the art world of the 1980s. McDermott’s description said something about Nickas himself, whose admitted attraction to periphery genius has shaped more than two decades of art criticism and enterprise.

His sparkling exchange with McDermott and McGough is revisited in Theft Is Vision, a gathering of Nickas’ essays, interviews and musings from 1995–2008. He read from and signed copies of Theft Is Vision and other works on April 4th at Art Catalogues, the aptly named bookstore at MoCA Pacific Design Center, joined by painter David Ratcliff, who signed copies of his exhibition catalogue defect’s mirror as well as Aborted by Birth, the debut record from Brooklyn metal band Orphan and the first release on Nickas’ From the Nursery label (Ratcliff painted the cover design for the record, which saw a limited run of 666 copies on white vinyl with sides F and U instead of A and B).

The selections Nickas read from Theft Is Vision were absorbing, but not more so than his thoughts on interviewing (he prefers the getting-it-rightness of written interviews to the keeping-it-realness of spoken interviews), his answer to a question about why he might lose interest in an artist (personal grudges are not out of the question), the account of his experimental foray into collecting (and consequent spiral into collector-like bad behavior), and his interaction with a woman who had forgotten to set her cell phone to vibrate during the reading (Offender: “I’m sorry.” Nickas: “Me too.”)

Interruptions notwithstanding, the reading gave a glimpse into Theft Is Vision as a deep collection of the author’s most important writings and showed him to be every bit as fascinating as the oddities to whom he gravitates.

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