When you first step
into Hobart’s $224 million über art attraction MONA (Museum of Old and New Art)
you can feel the difference. This is a radical departure from your usual art
museum. The white cube has been banished in favour of darkened rooms with
spotlit objects and complex layouts, and there is not a label or wall text to
be seen. And then it dawns on you. For all its high tech trappings this is a
return to old school museum display and the cabinet of curiosities.
The hand of private
collector David Walsh is all over his museum especially in the material
previously known as labels. Although MONA prides itself on having no labels or
explanatory panels, the usual museum verbiage is not far away. It’s been tipped
onto a hard drive to be accessed by an iTouch given to all visitors. Branded as
The O . And Walsh, in a move that saves MONA from being what could easily have
become lugubrious, plays the humour card. Look up Walsh’s comments on a baby
monkey skeleton sitting in a chair (it’s that sort of place) and you get, “This
is so cute, look at his little hands resting on the chair.’ That’s the first
time. If you check it out again it comes up “ “This is so gross, look at his little hands
resting on the chair.’
Walsh also uses the
The O to undercut his critics (and there are some despite the runaway popular
success of MONA). Commenting on one work Walsh mentioned he had prosopagnosia
(an inability to recognize people by their faces) which in turn prompted art
critic Christopher Allen to bring out his stick. “It may explain why a lot of the works he
has chosen are rather coarse and obvious in meaning, and why the paintings and
other two-dimensional works are mostly mediocre”. Walsh immediately added this
to The O commentary. Nice.
So MONA is very, very
popular, people stay for a very, very long time and the experience is
brilliantly personalised. You can check out what Mary looked at by going to http://mona.net.au/theo/ and entering mary@barrs.co.nz (I forgot to ‘LOVE’ it –
you can press a love or hate button on your ‘O’ for each work - but my most
favourite work was in fact Lucio Fontana’s Spatial concept).
The museum profession
is watching MONA closely of course. The success of its Google-like gathering of
objects and DIY connoisseurship suggests a way to attract audiences by valuing personal
responses over institutional expertise. As Walsh says himself about looking at MONA's latest
exhibition Theatre of the world “the less you know about art the better you are off.” If MONA gets
to lead the way, it’s going to be a game changer.
Image: the baby monkey skeleton on a chair. By the way, if you look up the commentary on the work a third time you get "The Victorians were so weird."
