Mona - Museum of Old and New Art

From Hobart, there are many ways to get to the MONA. You can travel by boat on the 'MONA ROMA', by car, even by Sea Plane. We chose to hire bikes and cycle the 15miles return trip to the peninsula. Quite a challenge with three gears, back brakes and uphill the whole way there!

The Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is an art museum located within the Moorilla winery on the Berriedale peninsula in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, officially opened on 21 January 2011. It is the largest privately funded museum in Australia.
http://www.planbooktravel.com.au/attractions/tas/hobart
The museum presents antiquities, modern and contemporary art from the David Walsh collection. Walsh has described the museum as a "subversive adult Disneyland." He's even named his parking spaces...

The single-story MONA building appears at street level to be dominated by its surroundings, but its interior possesses a spiral staircase that leads down to three larger levels of labyrinthine display spaces built into the side of the cliffs around Berriedale peninsula. Most visitors approach by ferry up the River Derwent.

There are no windows and the atmosphere is intentionally ominous. On entering the museum, visitors descend a "seemingly endless flight of stairs", an experience one critic compared with "going down into Petra".

To see the art, the visitor must work back upwards towards the surface, a trajectory that has been contrasted with the descending spiral that many visitors follow in New York's Guggenheim Museum.

Just some of the displays we saw...
Cement Truck

Full-size cement truck of laser-cut corten steel

Fat Car

Erwin Wurm’s humorous sculpture, Fat Car, can be seen as a comment on 21st-century consumer indulgence. He has taken one of the world’s most desirable material symbols of motorized power, style, design and speed – the Porsche Carrera convertible – and engorged it, distended it, almost but not quite beyond recognition. Although there is something about its form that remains instantly recognisable, and the paintwork is superb, this body sags and bulges with excess. Even the seats inside are bloated.

Chapel

Wim Delvoye’s work is riddled through with visual and historical references – to religion, art history, mathematics, biology, popular culture and more. Look outside. Here – as in so much of Delvoye’s art – purpose, medium and scale are all transmogrified in relation to expectation.

Sternenfall

Bookcase comprising two iron elements with lead books (190-200 volumes) and glass

Artifact

Greg says good art operates on a 'wider broadband': that which transcends words.
‘To put it baldly, buying a living artist’s work has two advantages – the museum pays less and the artist eats.’
– Lloyd Goodrich in the 1960s, then director of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York