In the spring of 2009 I attended the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair. It was a revelation.

The main room was like an Art Gallery, except that there were no walls. And the galleries were arranged in a grid pattern instead of being parallel to the walls.

I became fascinated by the patterns of movement of the visitors through this space – and then I realized that what made it fascinating was that there were two kinds of movement: art lovers and dealers.

What happens when both kinds of people are moving through a space? The dealers are trying to look at as many artworks as they can, while picking up information about prices; whereas the art lovers are trying to spend as much time with each artwork as possible, while picking up information about quality.

And so there is a constant tension between them. An art lover will slow down and examine an artwork closely, but if she does this to one work for more than 30 seconds, then a dealer who wants to see more works will walk around her and move ahead. Similarly if a dealer slows down and looks closely at one work for more than 30 seconds, then an art lover who wants to spend more time with each work will walk around her and move ahead.

The subtitle is “work from the Hayward Gallery.”

The Hayward Gallery, in London, England, is a public exhibition space in Southbank Centre. It was built in 1968 and refurbished in 2002. The gallery organizes exhibitions of contemporary art and hosts performances of dance, music and theater. The current director is Ralph Rugoff.

This book is a publication of the Hayward Gallery and it’s a catalogue for an exhibition about industrial arts.

It features works by 14 artists and designers from the 1960s to today.

To someone unfamiliar with the art of my time, it would be most natural to assume that I was a sculptor. This is not because of any strength in that direction, but because I have had the good fortune to be involved with a gallery that specializes in sculpture.

The sculpture market is flooded with items made by artists who no longer know what they are doing. This is an occupational hazard, as it were; after you have been an artist for some years, the audience begins to expect something from you, and if you fail to deliver the expected thing, they begin to wonder whether you are still an artist.

Artists who have been working out of doors for centuries tend to deal with this problem by providing the expected thing, even though it is no longer appropriate. Hence the proliferation of images of wild animals and totemic representations of people. The old stories die hard.

Totems, by their nature, are limited in number; wild animals can’t be everywhere at once. Some artists take up a different form of representational subject matter: human figures; buildings (often churches); things involving boats or trains or cars; foodstuffs; toys; clothing; machinery; and so on. In other words, everything else except wild animals and totemic representations

The proposal is to use the gallery space as a place for artists to test new forms of industrial art, where industry is defined as the processing of information. The programming of computers is only one kind of industrial art, though it is one that has already undergone an explosive rate of development. Industrial art may be seen as an aspect of cybernetics, the study of systems of communication and control.

A system that produces images or sounds is already an example of industrial art. The main difference between these systems and those that are proposed here lies in their scale and complexity. The aim is to extend the scope and power of such systems by using automated processes that overlap with those used in science and industry. This will allow us to create works which do not merely respond to events but make their own autonomous decisions about what they should do next.

Industrial art is the art of designers, not artists. It can be produced by machines as easily as by people. It is made of materials like rubber and plastic instead of paint and clay. But it is art in the sense that it is made for the sake of beauty rather than necessity.

There are many kinds of industrial art; there are whole museums devoted to industrial design, and to graphic design, and to architecture, and so on. Modernism in all these fields was a reaction against ornamentation, which it thought frivolous. So its practitioners tried to produce designs whose starkness had a kind of purity—the pure beauty of zero decoration.

But that was an error. Zero decoration is less beautiful than some decorations, because it’s zero: nothing instead of something. It’s an absence that can’t help but be noticed. What makes beautiful things beautiful is not just their positive qualities but their negative qualities: the holes they leave for our imagination to fill in; the spaces around them that their shape defines; the contrast they create with the parts they set aside so as to make their beauty stand out even more.

Artists have always been fascinated by the mind of the consumer. A famous example is Andy Warhol’s 1962 silk-screen painting, “Campbell’s Soup Cans,” which depicts a row of cans of Campbell’s soup in the style of an Andy Warhol painting. He was well aware that he would have to explain to people why it qualified as art, and he considered doing a painting of Brillo boxes, but decided that would be too easy. He said, “I really like them. I think they’re great paintings. But I just can’t do it because everybody else would.”

When people buy things, they often try to find some connection between the thing they are buying and the thing they are buying it with. If you see someone wearing a T-shirt with an obscure band name on it, you can assume that person has bought into something connected with that band — probably not just the music, but also the subculture. You could wear that same shirt yourself; if you do, people will assume you are trying to communicate something about yourself by doing so. But if you don’t know what that thing is, then wearing that shirt will not communicate anything about yourself; it will just look like you are trying to copy someone else who is trying to

The Museum of Modern Art established a Department of Industrial Design in 1936, and the term “industrial design” was coined in the same year, as American companies began to hire designers to improve the quality of their products.

These first industrial designers looked to Europe for inspiration, and the Museum’s Department of Industrial Arts (later renamed Design Research) served as a clearinghouse for European design ideas.

The term “industrial design” was soon adopted by American manufacturers, who used it to describe their efforts to improve the aesthetics of industrial products; in some cases, these were actual collaborations with designers.

Some 1920s and 1930s industrial designs have become icons: examples include household appliances and office equipment such as the classic Eames chair (1948) and molded plywood chairs designed by Florence Knoll for Knoll Associates (1955). Other notable works from this period include Raymond Loewy’s locomotive for the Pennsylvania Railroad (1928), Norman Bel Geddes’s streamlined railroad car (1933), and Henry Dreyfuss’s “Instrument of Trade” for IBM (1957). These designs are now known as collectively as ‘mid-century modern.’