How to stop worrying and learn to love modern art In 1975, the musician Brian Eno devised a deck of cards with his friend Peter Schmidt, an artist. Named Oblique Strategies and subtitled "Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas," the pack has passed into several editions of varying value and acquired a cult following among creative people of every stripe. It was initially designed to help break through creative block: if you were trying to write or compose something and had got stuck, you could pull out a card at random and see where it led you. "Use an old idea," read one. "Honour thy error as a hidden intention," instructed another. They weren't quite fortune cookies or Tarots or dares, but the tangents they suggested were supposed to make you swerve out of a rut. Decades later, the Redstone Press - longstanding publishers of exceptional diaries and ingenious art books - have produced a distant relative. Art Rules! (And How To Break Them) is a book in a box, a product that looks like a game or a gift but in fact questions the very nature of art history. Its punning title - both a cheer and a description - sets the playful tone. "How can you stop worrying and learn to love modern art?" asks its author, Mel Gooding, twisting Stanley Kubrick's famous strapline to Dr Strangelove. Really, though, it's more for enthusiasts than worriers: Gooding, a critic and a professor, assumes Art Rules! has reached you because you already have your own "map" - you know what modern art you like, in other words - and the book and box "describe and explain how works of art came into existence." Is it for makers of art, or viewers, or thinkers? Well, all three. There is a pamphlet, and there are 42 cards, divided into seven themed sets: Making Images; Collage; Photo Art; Walks, Maps and Dreams; Surrealist Games; Found Objects Transformed; Arrays and Collections. It doesn't deal in pigeonholes such as "abstract" or "figurative," Impressionist or Post-impressionist. Each category contains five "game cards," and each of those depicts a work of art that was made using a certain technique - a work by Kurt Schwitters, say, for collage - then explores the history of that technique on the back. There are suggestions of other works you might look at, and a practical exercise: make a line drawing while blindfold, for instance; make an abstract collage out of torn paper; carry a camera at all times; choose a familiar object and transform it into something strange. Still, Gooding insists Art Rules! is not designed as an instruction manual for practitioners, so why is he explicitly asking us to inhabit the making of art? The answer is that by inviting us to step into an artist's shoes, he hopes to question traditional art criticism. If you understand, simply, how things are done, then your view of art is no longer reliant on "-isms." "You approach art from the inside out, so to speak," he writes. You play the games that artists play. So Art Rules! becomes a thought-provoking cross between Eno's Oblique Strategies and the idea behind Trading Places: a loosening of received ideas, a set of challenges; enlightenment and inspiration. You will see things differently, it seems to say, just by standing somewhere else. (And How To Break Them) is published by Redstone Press (£19.95)