It would be hard on the face of it to find dustier-sounding topics in art than those suggested by Peter Burke’s The Connoisseur: A Cultural History and Shira Brisman’s The Goldsmith’s Debt: Conceptions of Property in Early Modern Art. And yet the questions lurking at the heart of both books could hardly be more timely: What counts as originality, what value do we place on it, how do we protect that value, and for whose benefit?

In the catalog for “Sublime Poetry,” the exhibition’s curator, Carmen C. Bambach, writes: “That Raphael enjoyed three hundred years of uninterrupted fame, occupying his position as the premier artist of the West until the late nineteenth century, should prove sufficiently the timelessness of his art.” But timelessness eventually went out of fashion. Apart from high schoolers cramming for AP Art History, Raphael takes up relatively little public brain space these days. To the degree that his geometric precision, balanced color, and idealized naturalism were the foundation of academic painting, he became associated with an unctuous, prettified stasis. When Manet borrowed those three poses from The Judgment of Paris, he wasn’t seeking the eternal sublime; he was sticking a pin in its balloon.

As with MoMA’s earlier shows of African and folk art, American Indian art merited inclusion in a museum of modernism not because it was modern, but because it offered inspiration to a Euro-American avant-garde. Somehow, modernist aping of Indigenous models got told as a story of increasing originality, while Indigenous adaptation of Western models was seen in terms of decreasing authenticity. The logic was clear enough: The proper job of Western art was forever to point to the future; that of Indigenous art was forever to repeat the past. It has taken a century for the art world to realize its mistake, but contemporary Indigenous art is now having a moment.

There is no useful name for Dunham’s baggy knot or the echidna-prickly-pear thingummy. (This essay would be much shorter if there were.) One can slap similes and adjectives all over them and still most of their essence escapes. The point of them is to be looked at, rather than recognized and classified. For decades it had been important to Dunham that when you saw his pictures “you couldn’t say what they were.” But then, at a certain point, you could.

David Hockney, who died at 88 in June, became famous as a young artist for imbuing 20th-century life with the formality and stasis of early Renaissance painting. His sharp-edged figures stand by the pool or sit by a coffee table in spaces as orderly as those in a Fra Angelico annunciation. The real world does not look so tidy, symmetrical, and enchanting. Except, very occasionally, when it does.

For all the knocking back and forth of motifs, Morisot’s work never looks much like Manet’s, or vice versa. He was the master of flatness and opacity, whereas her brushstrokes seem to operate like flash mobs, gathering for a moment before going their separate ways. The child in Manet’s The Railway, all dolled up in her fancy frock and earrings, is a monumental and static figure, locked in place by belching steam and the equally monumental woman beside her. When Morisot’s children look away it feels like a momentary distraction, an attitude that might change in an instant.

Western museums have often used the poverty, political instability, or corruption of plundered places as an argument against repatriation. But no imbalances are permanent. Ancient Greeks could not have imagined that the glories of Pergamon—one of the Seven Wonders of the World, depending on who was doing the counting—would end up in the bogs of some primitive, outlandish peoples in the distant north. Maybe we should think of repatriation—of spreading the wealth around a bit—as a form of insurance. After all, even the wealthiest and most storied of democracies can devolve into shameless kleptocracies with astonishing rapidity.

“Sanctuary” is a reminder of just how singular an artist Puryear is. It’s a serious work of contemporary art that seems to have fallen out of a fairy tale—not the monophonic Disney kind but the capricious, found-object kind collected by the Brothers Grimm, in which the moral is oblique, anything can come to life, and nobody leaves unscathed. Born in 1941, Puryear came of age at a time when sculpture was flexing its muscle through intimidating scale, conceptual rigor, and protractor-perfect geometries. (Think Richard Serra, Nancy Holt, and Mark di Suvero.) For a moment, Puryear almost seemed to fit.

Our attention is being endlessly redirected. The brightest things in the picture—that bit of blue heaven and the red-and-white house across the canal—are also the most distant. Meanwhile, the one piece of incipient action is hidden in shadow: a child of 5 or 6, standing on the threshold between what we can see clearly and what we can’t, with a kolf stick cocked to send a small ball straight out of the picture and into our world.

We know of nothing,” Henry James observed in 1875, “that is a better proof of the essential impotence of criticism, in the last resort, than Mr. Church’s pictures.” James wasn’t (in this instance) being spiteful. He was trying to sort out a real problem: What did the work of America’s preeminent painter actually mean? Serious art is supposed to mean something—that’s a given—but really, what is there to say about Frederic Church’s Valley of Santa Ysabel, New Granada? You see distant mountains, an effulgent sky reflected in placid water, lots of greenery, and tiny people not doing much besides establishing the scale of an adjacent palm. You can feel the stillness and weight of the air. “Why not accept this lovely tropic scene as a very pretty picture,” James asked, “and have done with it?” A century and a half later, we’re still stumped.

In its idealized self-vision, the discipline of ethnology aimed to document the cultural variety and evolution of our species. But “evolution” could be—and often was—twisted to suggest a hierarchy of Homo sapiens, from primitive to advanced. The inventors of this hierarchy naturally placed themselves at the top, and the Venn diagram overlap between the subjects of ethnology and the subjects of colonial occupation speaks for itself. This history is now the cause of embarrassment and public apology on the part of museums. But the collections are still with us.

Visitors to Huyghe and Parreno exhibitions are faced with a similar task: working to form a coherent picture from scattered inputs. There is no way for a viewer to really understand how weather data might be affecting the Tabernas video feed or whether the sounds that emerge from “Liminal” or the A.I. newscaster are, as the artists claimed, embryonic language. You can believe the proffered explanations or not. Either way, you’ll know you’ve made a choice, which is undoubtedly the point.