In a parlor game played by the Surrealist group the foremost avant-gardists of their time participants made their marks on the quadrants of a folded sheet of paper: a many-eyed head, a distorted torso, hands fondling swollen breasts, snarling reptilian-dog feet descending from an egg-shaped midsection. The Exquisite Corpse, as it was called, is still very much alive, having found artistic and critical expression from the days of the Surrealists down to our own. This method has been used in collective artistic protocols as the rules of engagement for experimental art, as a form of social...