Marcel Duchamp and the object, reactivated

Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, its spokes spinning above a wooden kitchen stool with no destination in mind, is arguably the most consequential non-artwork in the history of art. Not a sculpture in the traditional sense, not quite an object either, it hovers in a suspended state between utility and thought, action and speculation. Paired with Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal rotated ninety degrees and signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt, these objects inaugurated a shift in how form, authorship, and meaning are understood that has never fully resolved itself .

What Duchamp initiated was a slow-release mechanism, a way of thinking that drifts, mutates, and reappears across time, activating new meanings each time it is encountered.…