My, how time flies—six years on, and Patrick Caulfield’s up for another retrospective. (The last one was at London’s Serpentine Gallery, in 1992–93.) It’s one of those things a person can rely on, a little like the eternal return of the commodity. (In fact, a lot like it.) The Hayward Gallery is currently stocking fifty-five jazzy, glowing Caulfield desirables, dating from 1961 to 1997, most of them expertly handcrafted in genuine acrylics. The best place to start window-shopping is right in the middle, at the precooked meals section, with exhibit number 28: Unfinished Painting, 1978.

This work

Those with a less-than-iron constitution may have come away from Steve McQueen’s recent exhibition feeling a bit queasy. The show had visitors spinning on a mirrored playground carousel, watching in silence as a house fell down, or sitting—it was better to sit—while Manhattan revolved around them in giddy triplicate.

The merry-go-round, White Elephant, 1998, is a sort of oversize praxinoscope, the early cinematic device whose rotating mirrors created the illusion of movement in a series of images. Sitting in a neon-lit, Barbie-doll-pink space, McQueen’s mirrored carousel splinters your body into

In an essay on Dürer, Roger Fry complained about the “perverted technical ingenuity” of German art; it was the product, he felt, of a society that privileged “acrobatic feats” of technique. Fry would surely have given short shrift to virtuosos such as Andreas Gursky, that master of the computer-assisted photographic print, and perhaps even to his younger compatriot, the Berlin-based photographer Thomas Demand.

Demand is known for taking photographs of three-dimensional models of modernist architecture that he painstakingly constructs in his studio from paper and cardboard. In a further twist,