Richard Wentworth sums up “Thinking Aloud,” the traveling show he curated for the Hayward gallery, in characteristically unassuming language: It’s an assembly of items that collectively reveal “how we give meaning to things” and “the way that some things are like other things, and some things are different.” He insists he has “no fixed agenda”; he is not revealing his own train of thought, but drawing together things—thumbnail sketches, cardboard prototypes, diagrams, and so forth—that exemplify the links between artmaking and other problem-solving processes. Accordingly, visitors are left to

As part of Ross Sinclair’s recent show, he ran a stall in one of London’s street markets for a day. You could buy T-shirts, mugs, key rings, and pens, all bearing the legend “I ♥ Real Life.” For Sinclair, “real life” is not something that exists but something dreamed of or longed for, something that exerts itself as an idealized possibility out of the more immediate situation of cultural uncertainty.

At the gallery hung seven photographs of Sinclair lying face down like a corpse in a variety of otherwise idyllic natural settings: on a woodland path, in a river, at the water’s edge. In each image