MONA - by Tre

    The city of Hobart is an interesting place. It's very old, the oldest settlement in all of Australia. The houses are predominantly variations of cozy brick cottages with little lawns full of rose bushes. The city itself spans several hillsides, and many houses have retaining walls because of the steepness of the land they were built on. The harbor is full of the masts of sailing ships and, as I write this, many businesses are closed for the Royal Hobart Regatta, which is a public holiday in the southern portions of the state. This all adds up to a very picturesque scene. But, at least to me (and I think you'd agree, too), Hobart holds something far more interesting than sailboats or cottages.

    The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is the largest privately funded museum in the Southern Hemisphere. It is accessible by either a twenty-minute drive from Hobart or a short ferry ride up the river. The museum is situated on a point formed by a curve in the river and looks like a cluster of buildings and sculptures from ground level. However, a set of glass stairs (and a glass elevator) leads down straight into the rock, revealing the hidden depths (see what I did there?) of this remarkable museum.

    Now, before we get to the art in the museum, we must first talk about the art of the museum. The museum itself is a work of art and at the very least deserves its own paragraph. The first thing you notice when you step off the glass stairs are the walls. Massive slabs of sandstone rise to ceilings so high that they are shrouded in darkness. The whole museum was dug directly out of the rock, which gives the bonus of these natural sandstone walls. Then, you would probably notice a tall waterfall that seems to spell words (but we'll get to that later), and continue along the wide hallway. Next, we enter what, for the sake of simplicity, I will call the atrium. A truly immense room, you could easily walk several hundred feet in any direction before hitting a wall. But if you think that is large, I must direct you to look up. The ceiling truly shows the vastness of the museum's main room, as the ceiling of the floor you're currently on is probably, say, 30 feet high, but gaps and holes in it show you just how high this room extends. Suffice it to say, that this room extends several floors high divided by walkways, large platforms, and many bronze-colored metal staircases that twist back on themselves, fork off, and are generally quite confusing as to where they lead. And while this massive room holds much of the artwork in the museum, there is more to this museum than you have yet seen. However, it would take far too long to outline all of the museum's rooms so I'll just say this: the rest of the museum extends in a rather hodge podge fashion, with rooms clearly added after the fact. The museum is very big. There is a whole wing of tunnel-like hallways leading to circular rooms. I'm not quite sure about the sanity of the owner.

    Now that we've spoken about the building itself, we can dive into the art inside it. The MONA is not your average art museum, as I'm sure you can already tell. It has an exceptionally broad range of art, from 14th-century paintings to working mechanical models of the human digestive tract (feeding time is at 11:00 and 4:00). It has wings devoted entirely to old art, entirely to new, and somewhere in between. And while much of the old art is what you would expect, old paintings, old maps, and old crosses; the new art is something else entirely. Of course, you still have your "modern art" eg. a chair artfully set on a rug, abstract crayon scribblings (no offense to you modern art lovers, it's just not my thing). But some of the new art is truly amazing. There's a mural of a snake the size of a wall, made up of tons of tiny crayon drawings; a man who lip syncs Proud Mary every five years; and, again, a working digestive system that uses chemicals to break down the quiche and pastries that the staff feeds it, then sends it out the other end at 2:00 on the dot.

Cloaca profesional, a working artificial digestive system

A sculpture called Fat Car, a pun of the Austrian slang fett, a word used to describe a car as cool or nice. 

    While the museum has a lot of truly unique art pieces, it also has some amazing artwork integrated into the museum. A piece called "bitfall.", a giant water fall that spells out words pulled from headlines around the world, is beautifully combined with the museum's natural sandstone walls. What you might think is an interesting sculpture on the museum grounds is actually a parabolic microphone that leads to an echo chamber, meaning that people 3 stories below in the exhibit Confessional can hear someone whispering on the surface. More exhibits use sound, optical illusions, and light to create interesting rooms and exhibits that are created as the museum grows. 

A piece called bitfall. blends beautifully with its sandstone backdrop.

The author at the outside of the parabolic microphone

    The museum is estimated to be worth at least €200 million between the art and the building. Tickets are free for locals and only $15-40 for everyone else. Now, once you add in taxes and paying staff, it becomes almost impossible for it to turn a profit. In fact, it's only been profitable twice in its existence: once in 2014 because the museum experienced much higher numbers of people, and once in 2020 because they happened to get a rebate on their payroll tax. Every year, the owner pays $8 million-18 million out of pocket to prop up the museum. You'll be quite surprised by how he got all of this money.

    David Walsh, the owner of the Museum of Old and New Art, has an approximate net worth of $200 million. And he made it gambling. That's not something you hear everyday. Born in Australia, he started out counting cards in Las Vegas with a college friend of his, Zeljko Ranogajec. After moving back to Tasmania, he wrote his own software for predicting the outcome of horse races. This would become a key part of Ranogajec's betting syndicate. In the early days of the syndicate, Walsh did most of the calculations and mathematics as he was highly intellectually gifted. Later in life, the syndicate moved on to large lotteries and races, which help to fund Welsh's ever-growing museum.

    Everything about the MONA is unique, from its notoriously gifted but eccentric owner and the way he made his money to the building itself and the art it contains. We loved our time in the museum, and would absolutely love to come back again.