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Questioning Art in Hobart

January 17, 2011 by Marion Maneker

The Sydney Morning Herald takes a tour of David Walsh’s MONA–Museum of Old and New Art–that is being built in Tasmania:

The last thing he wants to do, though, is to tell people what to think, or make them feel inferior or intimidated. Indeed, he is not averse to sending up the pretensions of the art world, and visitors will be encouraged to have an opinion. People don’t have to like his art; he’s not even sure he likes all of it.

”We don’t know what ‘good’ is,” he says. ”We’re never going to know what ‘good’ is because there is no such thing as ‘good’. There’s taste and there’s style and there’s charisma and pizzazz and charm and chutzpah. We’ve got a million words for describing the same thing and nobody really knows what it is.”

He says while many museums hide behind a cloak of authority and demand quasi-religious faith from their audiences, he wants to do the opposite.

Tasmanian Gamble Turns Art World On Its Head (Sydney Morning Herald)

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Filed Under: Museums Tagged With: Australia

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