“If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved,” the avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp explained. “Bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.” To fight the good fight, he championed the readymade, an approach that culminated in Fountain, the infamous urinal from 1917—you know the one—signed with the pseudonym “R. Mutt.” Duchamp never stopped reinventing himself. In 1935, for instance, he created his “portable museum,” a suitcase-sized retrospective replicating his life’s work in miniature. Now, more than 300 works come together for the first U.S. Duchamp retrospective since 1973. It traces a career built on contradiction. As he himself put it, “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” —Elena Clavarino