MONA is one of the quirkiest art galleries in the world, and if you’re a big fan of art or anything weird and beautiful, you should definitely visit it! It is located in Hobart, the capital of the Australian island state of Tasmania.
Tasmania is well known for its beautiful hikes and amazing beaches, but this art gallery is a different attraction altogether! The gallery is perfect if you are exploring an Australian island and have a rainy day.
It’s called “rebellious Disneyland for adults,” with the strangest rides detailing everything from human body functions to Egyptian mummies. It’s not a museum for the faint of heart, there’s a disgraceful machine that can turn anything into excrement and more!
MONA – The Museum of Old and New Art is an exotic venture by Tasmanian millionaire David Walsh that opened in early 2011 in the Apple Island capital. Having made a lot of money in some mystical way from the sweepstakes, Walsh assembled the largest private collection of contemporary art in the Southern Hemisphere, and displayed it in a multi-level space built into the cliffs of fantastic design, with an elevator, but no windows. For nearly three years now, MONA has been one of Hobart’s major attractions, provoking Lonely Planet to put the city at number seven on its “Places to visit in 2013” list, which I did last weekend.
Holy Virgin Mary by Englishman Chris Ofili (1996):
The painting was made famous by a lawsuit between New York City Mayor Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum, which exhibited it, in 1999. Like many of Ofili’s works, it contains lacquered elephant droppings (in this case, Mary’s right breast is made of this material) and is covered in stylized “butterflies” from pictures of female genitalia cut from porn magazines, which caused the Presbyterian Church to disapprove. Giuliani described the creation as “sick and disgusting” and tried to sue the museum for its annual funding from City Hall, but he lost. Giuliani’s exhibition at the Australian National Gallery in Canberra in 2000 was also cancelled because of the court case. And the painting was also tried twice by viewers in the United States. Walsh bought it for MONA in 2007.
It should be noted that some exhibits in the museum are the apotheosis of a certain “inflation of outrage” over the past 150 years. For example, in 1883, the painting Chloe by French artist Jules Lefebvre, which now hangs on the wall in Melbourne’s Young and Jackson Bar, was scandalously removed from the National Gallery of Victoria after three weeks of exhibition under pressure from the Church Assembly. It simply depicted a pretty girl with no clothes, nothing special. In the 21st century, of course, no one is shocked by the subject of boobs. There are severed cocks, blood, shit, and a lot of other unappetizing images in that vein. It’s hard to say what’s going to happen in a hundred years, in fact the limit has been reached, I guess. Some of the works in MONA are quite schizophrenic in a bad way, it would be better if they would take that shit out of sight. But people do go and look, of course. In the words of one reviewer in Quadrant magazine, “MONA is the art of a tired, fading civilization, highlighting moral bankruptcy.