At the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through May 12, 2008.

The birth of Bakelite, the first synthetic plastic, revolutionized design in the 20th century. For the first time in human history, things could be created as if from nothing, rather than carved from wood or stone, or fashioned from metal. Within two decades of its 1907 advent, plastic was being used in radios, cars, and telephones; by the century’s end it was in the fabric of the city (in buildings), in the human body (pacemakers), and in outer space (satellites). When Mr. McGuire advised Ben in 1967’s The Graduate, “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it,” he was not just talking about the material. “Plastic” signified an ethos, a way of life that was fast, cheap, infinitely reproducible, and endlessly variable. Plastic, then, is an analogy for the century that gave us the assembly line, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the Barbie doll, Pop culture, and the mass media.