Limitless are the ways in which artists combine in their work both convention and innovation. And ever unanswered remains the question of whether it is easier for an artist to do one of these two things or the other, whether he or she is following his natural bent when he gives us what is expected, constructed out of what his audience is familiar with, as the way to make a painting or a play, or when he or she is listening to his own inner ear and eye and mind. Henrik Ibsen was at the height of his art in “John Gabriel Borkman”, crafting a play whose suspense was in the revealing of the relations of the characters rather than marked by changes in the characters. He was not being true to the traditions of Shakespearean or French Classical drama in that the play does not hinge on events but on making the audience think new things about the characters, but was that not, in fact, true to what is always true about drama, which is that surprises of one sort or another are what move it onto its inevitable or prefigured or quirky conclusion? Drama is still drama even if it unfolds in accord with fresh mechanisms. Let us make the same point, and deepen it, by considering three recent exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which seems no longer in the business of blockbuster shows but quite thoughtful minor ones.