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The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is a vast multistorey art gallery buried into the side of a peninsula in Hobart, Tasmania. It’s packed to the gills with almost two thousand ancient, modern, and contemporary artworks, from Ancient Egyptian sarcophagi and Warhol paintings to an Ai Weiwei installation and multisensory immersive experiences.

There are bigger museums with more illustrious collections, but MONA’s ironic, punk stylings make it into less an art gallery than what its founder, David Walsh, calls a “subversive adult Disneyland”. This may have been somewhat true when it opened in 2011, but in 2025 its Gen X-ish irony has worn thin.

The best way to reach MONA is on one of its futuristic catamarans, outfitted in dazzle camouflage. It’s faster to drive, but tourists love a boat ride and besides, it’s a 30 minute experience. A return ticket costs $28 AUD (£14 / $17 USD), while a “Posh Pit” ticket runs to $60 AUD and includes free drinks and canapés in a private lounge. I opted for the latter for strictly research purposes, and it was perfectly nice. 

MONA loves to poke fun at the rich, liberally throwing f-bombs into its website and marketing materials, but it’s an odd move given that nothing in the museum, including the Posh Pit, is that expensive compared to the actual Disneyland. In fact, the museum loses millions per year, meaning that even the Posh Pit is sustained by the largesse of its multimillionaire founder. I suppose there are worse things one can do with their money.

On arrival at MONA, you walk up 99 steps to a wide plaza dotted with various interactive artworks like a tennis court, a trampoline (I went on it twice) and James Turrell’s Amarna. The entrance to the museum proper leads to a spiral staircase descending into three basement levels spanning well over ten thousand square metres. Every gallery and exhibition space is generously appointed and deeply moody, as if Control had been transformed into a modern art museum.

Much of the moodiness stems from the total absence of labels and panels: if no-one needs to read anything, you can make the lighting as dark as you like. Museum labels are annoying for lots of other reasons, too: people crowd around them, and they can result in a sense of reluctant education. Instead, MONA encourages visitors to install their The O app via its impressively fast wifi.

Since GPS doesn’t work underground, the app uses Bluetooth beacons to locate visitors to within 3 metres, allowing it to display nearby artworks and accompanying information. This information – properly known as “interpretation” – comes in various forms, from a summary to “Art Wank” (i.e. default gallery style), “Gonzo” (informal musings, usually from the founder), “Ideas”, “Media” (music, audio interviews, etc.), along with the ability to upvote and downvote art and leave a comment. Visitors are thus freed from the tyranny of one-size-fits-all labels.

Problem… solved? Not quite. The app can’t detect orientation, so it might show all the artworks in a room: annoying, and frankly slower than reading a well-placed label. More importantly, I didn’t see many people looking at their phones at all. Perhaps this is good – why not let visitors make their own minds up? This assumes they’re coming into MONA with an open mind, though. But no such thing exists: I saw visitors linger at Ancient Egyptian objects and iconic artworks because they already “knew” they were important, unlike the unfamiliar drawings and paintings they passed by.

The sense of mystery is deepened by MONA’s penchant for jumbling up art from different periods and styles, and placing them within environments like a recreated 20th century wood-panelled basement. In doing so, individual artworks are rescued from the white cube of traditional galleries but subsumed into meta-installation art, a contextless environmental collage.

Lest I become labelled as an unthinking defender of orthodoxy, I will acknowledge that like all unconventional hangs, MONA’s galleries can help visitors look at art in a different way. The Salon Hang, cramming paintings into every space on a wall, can encourage visual exploration. The Surrealist exhibitions of the early 20th century were probably even more confusing than MONA. And of course, there’s immersive art experiences like Meow Wolf, where it’s practically impossible to discern one artwork from the next.

The difference with these three examples and MONA is that they each have a clear unifying theme, often of time but also of style or story. Do exhibitions need a unifying theme? Of course not. But the impression I got from MONA was one of chaos for the sake of chaos. Maybe there was a theme I missed, but then, it’s not as if there were any panel texts to enlighten me.

I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy parts of the app. It really was very nice to read different, detailed takes on artworks. Even better, the app lets visitors join virtual queues for installations that can take only a few at a time, freeing people up to wander. Just like theme parks, virtual queues update in real time, and often were shorter than expected due to people not turning up. I was able to “do” every installation in MONA thanks to the app – apart from James Turrell’s Unseen Seen, which I’d paid $30 AUD for in advance and wasn’t working on the day (I got a prompt refund and was notified by email, though).

Two of the installations I visited were Oliver Beer’s Confessional and Adrian Spinks’ installation, “Mummy and Coffin of Pausiris”. The former was quite powerful – you walked through a dark corridor that spiralled into a muffled chamber. There, your words were carried to an opening aboveground, where an unseen visitor could reply. When I confessed, a woman spoke back… I was less impressed by the latter, which struck me as typical exoticisation. Perhaps it was for the best that a couple of visitors were turned away for having the temerity to lack a smartphone.

Some installations, called “Art rides”, require extra payment or booking further in advance. Tickets aren’t excessive – just $10 or $20 AUD, probably more for crowd control than profit. James Turrell’s Event Horizon was a room covered in ultra-matte white paint, presenting an uncannily even colour that, in certain spots, filled your entire visual field. It was like the anti-Sphere in that depth perception became impossible: you couldn’t be sure whether a wall was a metre away or a hundred metres. Things got very trippy when the colours strobed.

Finally, there was Alfredo Jaar’s Divine Comedy, an astonishing, extravagant 30 minute multisensory immersive experience the likes of which I have never seen before. Three rooms represented Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Before entering Hell, my small group fastened harnesses around our waists, attaching us to a rail that snaked along the wall. The reason for this became apparent as we turned a corner into a room with bubbling water beneath our platform. A grid of red lights lit up the ceiling, and filament heaters turned up the temperature.

This was plenty atmospheric, but then the entire ceiling slowly descended until it was mere inches above our heads. It was now uncomfortably hot and this would’ve been impressive enough (dayenu!) until a whirlpool opened up in the water, a gyre so deep you could barely see where it ended. It was genuinely shocking.

Purgatory was sweet relief, a short film in black and white featuring Joan Jonas in a beautifully numbing performance. At the end, when we are to understand she has finally expired, the walls of the room abruptly descended to reveal windows, with natural light flooding in. 

In Heaven, we lay down on the floor beneath a digital sky. A voice explained this was an anechoic chamber, and we might hear sounds we normally wouldn’t. I heard my heart beating, and the grumbling stomach of the person next to me. After a few minutes, the sky began shrinking and strangely wispy mist emanated from its centre. We were engulfed in nothingness, disembodied and dissolved.

Divine Comedy was a complete, authored experience, perhaps the best thing I saw that day, and certainly one that benefitted from its founder’s unlimited resources. I shudder to think how expensive and inaccessible it’d be in London or New York. And yet it was the antithesis of the chaotic environmental collage that forms the rest of MONA.

On the way out, I made sure to stop at the vast performance space to hear live music. The red curtains and cocktail tables promised an appropriately Lynchian vibe, and for a while that held. But when the musician, Ben Salter, began chatting about his set and said hi to a friend who was visiting, the illusion was shattered. I was glad for it. As Sian Cain noted in The Guardian, 

Over the past 13 years Mona has layered itself in an irony that has now hardened like a carapace. If you don’t like what they do, you don’t get it; one-star reviews of Mona are displayed proudly at arrivals in Hobart airport. But that shield is a prison too, an automatic tendency to deflect that now feels almost childish.

In 2025, irony is past its sell-by-date. Thank god some artists are being allowed to crack that protective carapace.

Next month in Oslo

I’ll be in Oslo for Knutepunkt, the annual Nordic Larp conference! I’m doing three things:

• I contributed an article to the associated “KP book” about the links between the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser and larp. I’ll post this here when it’s published.
• I’ll be giving a short talk at the Sublime Pretense 2: Praxis Boogaloo symposium.
• I’m on a panel discussing the legacy of Mike Pohjola’s Turku Manifesto on its 25th anniversary.