The paralyzing wee-hours panic that haunts the art professions is the thought that maybe, after all, art is just stuff, like shoes or placemats. The mantra repeated to ease that dread has for centuries been “meaning”: art is different from stuff because, like great literature, it has something to say about what it means to be human, how we live our lives, what we believe. The catch, of course, is that “meaning” is so vague and malleable a concept, it borders on meaningless.

The setting for Archibald Motley’s bright and bumptious dance scene Blues (1929) was a café near the Bois de Boulogne frequented by African and Caribbean immigrants, where he would sit and sketch into the night. The subject is unquestionably modern, as are Motley’s smoothed-out surfaces and abruptly cropped edges, but the gorgeous entanglement of musicians and revelers—the chromatic counterpoint of festive clothing and faces that come in dark, medium, and pale—recalls far older precedents, such as Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana (1562–63), the enormous canvas at the Louvre that people back into when straining for a glimpse of the Mona Lisa.

History, Kentridge wants us to understand, is like his sculptures, or his films, or his drawings on concatenated book pages. There may be an instant where it all comes together and makes sense, but it’s we, not the data, who make the sense—“make” as in “manufacture,” as in “making it up.” Our brains are hardwired to find meaningful connections among any sensory inputs. We can’t help it. (This is a game at which art critics, like gamblers, habitually overestimate their skills.)

Kerry James Marshall is one of the world’s most celebrated painters, hailed for having redefined Blackness as a visual device and cultural subject, as well as for opening new vistas on what pictorial art can be and do. He has also been, from the beginning, a peintre-graveur—a painter who uses printmaking as a way of thinking, of aligning image and surface, of being in the world. For all their importance to the artist, however, Marshall’s prints—which range from the pocket-sized woodcuts to sixty-foot long installations of UV-cured ink on plexiglass—prints have never been discussed as a coherent body of work, and many have never been documented. This catalogue raisonné fills that void.

Both the right-wing empire and the left-wing Commune had ended in pointless, bloody, self-inflicted tragedies. The survivors, at least some of them, had learned to mistrust big ideas. An art about nothing might seem a strange defense, but the act of paying attention to what is rather than what should be—to the particular and ephemeral rather than the abstract and eternal—could be a bulwark against the seductions of ideology.

In the standard telling, the story of midcentury American art is a saga of hyperbolically talented painters working large and abstractly to manifest an existential encounter between man (notwithstanding the occasional begrudged woman) and material. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event,” in Harold Rosenberg’s catchy 1952 formulation. Canvas-as-event became a publicity magnet, inspiring popular news items like Life magazine’s 1949 “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” along with decades of New Yorker cartoons. On the home front, however, in private houses and apartments, things were different.

No artist has explored the thinginess of words more adroitly or deeply than Ruscha has at every step of his career. In the mid-Sixties he took up a kind of journeyman trompe l’oeil style (not smooth enough to fool the eye, but good enough that you get the idea) to picture typographic letters under pressure (the letters of “RADIO” squeezed with a C-clamp), and then liquids that coalesce into legibility: a puddle of baked beans that can be read as “Adios,” or the word “City” spelled out in clear droplets, its near-perfect circle of a C hinting at an absent highball.

Look around, and somehow poor Piranesi is still everywhere. His prints pop up like background chatter in photographs, fictions, and Logan Roy’s living room in Succession’s fourth season. Jorge Luis Borges and Le Corbusier were aesthetic and philosophical adversaries, but both decorated their rooms with Vedute...Louis Kahn, champion of modernist monumentality, had Piranesi’s quixotic plan of the Campo Marzio in his Philadelphia office; Peter Eisenman, architecture’s field marshal of fragmentation, has the same print in his bedroom.

Strangeness is overused as a selling point in contemporary art. There’s no real reason that “strange” should equate with “good,” and anyway most of what gets called strange trades on century-old surrealist tricks (jarring juxtaposition, biomorphic distortion, sexual kink) that are no longer strange at all. Every once in a while, though, something comes along for which no other word really suffices—something whose strangeness is not a strategy or a goal but the by-product of following a certain line of thought. Something whose strangeness creeps up on you, as it must have done on the artist as she worked, and changes the way you look at things.

A century after Constantine, Saint Augustine, a Berber from what is now Algeria, asked: “Who now knows which peoples in the Roman Empire were what, since we have all become Romans?” Two centuries after that, Emperor Heraclius considered moving the capital from Constantinople to Carthage, in present-day Tunisia. Visitors to the exhibition would do well to leave at the door any contemporary assumptions about the geography of wealth, power, religious animosity, and ethnic identification.

For Kerry James Marshall, art has always been “a set of problems that needed to be solved, the first of which was…the problem of Black representation.” It’s a bit like saying that the first problem to be solved is landing on the moon—a wildly ambitious but not insane goal as long as you are willing and able to tackle the myriad theoretical and technical problems that stand between you and success.

Of all the great painters of the golden age when the small, soggy Netherlands arose as an improbable global power, Johannes Vermeer is the most beloved and the most disarming. Rembrandt gives us grandeur and human frailty, Frans Hals gives us brio, Pieter de Hooch gives us busy burghers, but Vermeer issues an invitation. The trompe l’oeil curtain is pulled back, and if the people on the other side don’t turn to greet us, it’s only because we are always expected.