A man and a woman walk toward the camera down a wet cobbled street at night, holding hands, both in dark coats. She is looking at him. He is looking ahead. Behind them the crowd, the tram and the coloured lights of some installation dissolve into a field of soft discs, and the pavement runs away under their feet as a broad grey wedge. It is a photograph, taken in the last few years, and it belongs to a picture type that is three hundred years old.

Two figures share a photograph and refuse to share anything else. He stands on the left in a black suit, glasses, mid-sentence, addressing someone outside the frame. She stands on the right in a black slip dress, eating from a paper wrapper, eyes down. Running between them is the white vertical edge of a display panel, and that edge does more work than either sitter. The hinge that isn’t there Devotional painting spent three centuries solving this exact problem.

A dozen people in winter coats stand with their backs to the camera while a guide talks. Above and behind them, eleven or twelve paintings crowd a single wall in two and three loose tiers, tondos beside rectangles, wide frames beside narrow ones, a Chagall village floating at the far right with its white horse and its enormous eye. Nobody in the photograph is looking at the same picture, and several of them are looking at the guide instead.

Eight people stand on a wooden deck above a beach, bent forward at the waist with their hands reaching for their mats. Behind them the sand runs to a flat sea and a pergola with birds along its beam. Date palms rise through the whole frame, three on the left, four on the right, one heavy trunk cropped at the right edge. The trunks cut the picture into bays, and the bodies fall inside them.

Everyone has seen these pictures even if they couldn’t name a single photographer who took them. Bardot barefoot on the quay. A crowd of nobodies in sunglasses outside a café. A car with the doors open and someone half in, half out of it. They get reposted constantly, sold as prints in shops that have nothing to do with the Var, and used as mood boards for holidays nobody is actually taking.

Open any restaurant’s feed and the meat looks the same. Shot from directly above, on slate or bare wood, lit evenly, cropped so tightly that nothing else survives in the frame. It is a solved problem, solved the same way every time. Painters worked on the same subject for four centuries and never once solved it that way. Raw meat has a long and strange career in European art, and the pictures it produced are far more inventive than anything a phone camera does with a rib of beef.

Nobody standing in the plaza in December is looking at the sculpture. They are looking at a tree, and behind it a limestone slab that goes up further than the phone can frame. But the block they are standing on holds the most ambitious coordinated art commission ever attempted on a private American site, executed by roughly thirty artists working to a single written program, and it has never really been repeated.

Two Balthus canvases hang at right angles in the same room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the pairing is quietly strange. One is a twelve-foot alpine panorama full of people. The other is a single figure in an airless bedroom. Eighteen years and an entire temperament separate them. The big one is The Mountain, finished in 1937, oil on canvas, about 249 by 366 centimetres. It was the largest thing Balthus had painted to that point, and he did it in a cramped Paris studio from memory.

Almost everything most people know about art, they know from reproductions. Not from standing in front of the object, but from a plate in a book, a slide in a lecture hall, a poster on a wall, a screen. André Malraux gave that condition a name in 1947 and called it the museum without walls: a collection nobody owns, assembled out of photographs, in which a Sumerian seal and a Gothic tympanum and a Florentine marble sit on facing pages as equals.

A cobbled slope in Burgos, somewhere in the lanes below the cathedral. Stacked café chairs behind a low fence on the left. A furled umbrella out in the middle distance. One white Mini parked across the frame like it was left there by accident. Flat overcast, no shadows worth the name, and not a single person in a picture that contains perhaps two hundred windows. Painters spent most of European history treating a street as a container for events.