In the first chapter, I delve into examples to show how rules affect an artwork’s meanings. In 1991, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created a work called “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). To display it, the museum installs a pile of colorful wrapped hard candies with an “ideal weight” of 175 pounds. There is a rule that viewers are allowed to take candies from the pile, and the museum replenishes the pile periodically. Ross, who was Gonzalez-Torres’s lover, died of AIDS. The ideal weight, 175 pounds, is connected to the weight of a healthy adult man, one who is not wasting away due to illness. Since the work is presented as a portrait of Ross, and since the audience is invited to take and consume the candies, the work supports meanings having to do with overcoming the taboos associated with AIDS: eating the candy puts us in physical contact with this representation of Ross. The rule that we can eat the candy suggests positive qualities of Ross like being sweet, lighthearted, and generous. Displaying this work also gets the museum to do things museums don’t do very often: it lets us walk away with part of the artwork, and it gives us a simple pleasure, something sweet to eat right there in the gallery. If the work had a different rule – the candies are piled up right there, but we’re not allowed to touch them, just like we’re not allowed to touch the other works – the work couldn’t express the same things. It might seem more cynical, highlighting the arbitrary separation museums impose between audience members and the artwork rather than intervening in this separation. Sigalit Landau’s Barbed Salt Lamps were made by creating structures out of barbed wire and repeatedly dunking them into the Dead Sea until they were encrusted with salt. Landau, who is Israeli, has designed a rule to address the works’ fragility: as pieces of salt drop off, the objects should continue to be displayed without repair. This rule is available as a source of meaning, just as the unique materials are: they are listed on the wall label as “barbed wire and Dead Sea salt” to reveal both the nature of the materials and their regional connection. In the context of Israel and Palestine, barbed wire suggests separation of populations, restriction of movement, and denial of opportunity. Salt from the Dead Sea, a popular tourist destination renowned for its curative powers, is used to conceal the barbed wire, creating a luxurious-looking item we might expect to see in an affluent home. But the brutal underlying structure is destined to be revealed over time, creating a suggestive metaphor for the political situation in the region. There are also a lot of great pictures in the book, so I hope some readers might just thumb through, find an image that intrigues them, and drop in right there to find out what the artwork is all about. I wrote this book out of a persistent fascination and perplexity about a group of artworks that use a different set of resources than earlier visual artworks. The physical differences are obvious: many of these works include everyday objects and non-art materials. But even more striking, I eventually found, is that artists are using rules as a technology to set up opportunities and experiences that can be quite surprising and powerful. I’ve tried to take the audience on a tour of the machine room of artistic production to see background processes that profoundly shape our experience. Fundamentally, I hope this will make encounters with art richer and more fun. Once we know the role rules are playing, we know how to look for the opportunities a work might present to us. And once we know what the opportunities are, we can decide whether to pursue them, and what it means that the artist has chosen to offer these opportunities rather than different ones. Even when the rule itself is silly or obvious, thinking about it can open into some deep territory. You could watch a video of children cutting adults’ hair and find it mildly amusing. But what if the opportunity to let a kid cut your hair is directly open to you? Suddenly, you have to ask yourself a lot of questions: am I open to being this vulnerable? How much trust am I willing to place in people who are rarely trusted? How much is my identity tied up in how I am seen? Can I reframe incompetence as avant-garde? I hope this book puts people in a position to ask more questions, to look into possibilities beyond what is visible on the surface, and to ask what meanings are created when an artwork is made out of rules rather than just out of physical stuff.