Most of the objects in Design and Violence were created after 2001, and are imbued with recent history: There’s a mine detonator designed by an Afghan student. And a gun made with a 3-D printer. Design itself, Antonelli argues, is much more than Eames chairs and Braun toasters. It also has, as she says in her curator’s note, “a history of violence.”

This dark sentiment springs from an unlikely source: as provocateurs go, Antonelli is an exceptionally charming one. Petite and energetic, she is prone to fanciful descriptions of the world and its things—a verbal extension, perhaps, of a kind of object-oriented synesthesia. Design, to her, is everywhere. “Sometimes I tell people that I live in a Looney Tunes cartoon, where the fire hydrants go, ‘HELLO!’ ” she says. “You become almost an animist when you look at things that way.” Colleagues and critics alike describe her as “brilliant.” She has said that she believes “the age of design is upon us, almost like a rapture.” And she is spreading the word not just through her exhibitions at MoMA but also through books (five of them), TED talks (three), and an appearance on The Colbert Report. As Nicola Twilley, a design writer and sometime curator, says, she is “probably the person doing the most to expand the definition of design.”

One of Antonelli’s most remarked-upon MoMA exhibitions is an explicit attempt at this dilation: a collection of video games that includes Pac-Man, Myst, Tetris, SimCity 2000, Space Invaders, and Minecraft. The games are displayed, yes, but they are also meant to be played: they’re examples of interaction design, or what Antonelli calls “the design of a behavior.” In this case, that behavior is in noisy contrast to the hushed reverence typical of an art museum. As she walks me through the exhibit, the walls echo with the tinny theme music of Tetris and the delighted giggles of children. “I like when the kids come,” she says appreciatively. She especially likes watching them show the games to their parents. “It’s like, You think I’m wasting my time. But look, it’s art.”

You don’t bring Minecraft to MoMA, however, without provoking some “whither culture?” chattering among the art-world elite. Pac-Man so close to Picasso! As The Guardian sniffed in late 2012, months before the exhibit opened: “Sorry MoMA, Video Games Are Not Art.”

Antonelli dismisses such dismissals. She is, as an operative in the field of cultural curation, progressive. And she is, in this, part of a long tradition at MoMA. During the museum’s early days, in 1934, the architect and curator Philip Johnson put on an exhibition he called, simply, Machine Art. It took familiar industrial objects—a cash register, a propeller, a microscope—and, by displaying them outside of their normal contexts, called attention to their form. Antonelli aims to do something similar with her own acquisitions: to remove them from their familiar settings and encourage us to see them differently. She likes objects that are a bit dirty, a bit messy. (On the one hand, Apple’s Bauhaus-inflected products have “had an amazing influence,” she says, encouraging “people toward this purist, perfect design.” On the other hand, she confesses: “I think that a little dirt is good.”) She puts a vial of sweat on a pedestal at MoMA, and dares us to draw our own conclusions.