Every room in this walk is an argument about what happens when you put one thing inside another. The Temple of Dendur is an Egyptian sanctuary disassembled and reinstalled in a glass box on Fifth Avenue — its meaning wholly rewritten by its container. Drop Giacometti’s attenuated bronze figures inside that box, and the installation makes a third thing: two kinds of displacement in conversation, ancient stone against provisional thinness, each estranging the other. The Orientalism show a few galleries over extends the argument into geopolitics: the world’s fair, the ethnographic exhibition, the Orientalist painting are all machines for putting a subject inside a frame and calling the frame neutral.

The Met’s show hangs the Gérômes and Delacroix beside the actual Islamic objects they mined — and the mining becomes visible. The ’Hard and Soft Power’ section names what architects live inside daily: who builds the frame, who gets displayed within it, and how the frame pretends to be a neutral container while doing the sorting. Summertime and All That Jazz arrives at the same question from below — summer as scene, as a genre that frames musicians and dancers in the vocabulary of American leisure, which is itself a frame that obscures labor and race.

Together the three shows constitute a single argument about spatial authority: that the container is never neutral, that placement is always an act, and that the most consequential design decisions are the ones that get called natural. Close the walk at Debra Force by letting the Bearden prints do what the rest of the afternoon prepared you for — hold a figure inside a frame and ask who authorized it.