Six shows on two blocks, five closing this week, and every one asks the same question: what does it mean to make something? Akomfrah makes meaning from found footage and layered sound — he doesn’t invent, he recontextualizes. Close makes portraits from grids of abstract marks — the face only appears at distance.

Mohamedi lays hands on canvas and waits for the painting to reveal itself. Lichtenstein paints a picture of a brushstroke and dares you to call it inauthentic. Paula Cooper’s artists made work that defined a generation, and the gallery itself became the grammar that gave their language a home.

Walk these shows back to back and you’re walking through Wittgenstein’s central insight: meaning isn’t stored in the parts. It emerges in the use.