“I force myself to contradict myself,” said the revolutionary French artist Marcel Duchamp, “in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.” A rule-breaker at heart, Duchamp thought the work of his contemporaries was too “retinal” in nature. He set out to engage the mind rather than to pacify the eye, moving through Cubism and Dada and pushing on to Conceptual art and Futurism. He dangled a snow shovel from the ceiling; deemed a store-bought glazed urinal a work of art, which he titled Fountain; and placed a bicycle wheel on a stool. In The Art of the Possible, curators, artists, writers, and cultural critics retrace the life of the great Duchamp. —E.C.