Built by Australian gambling wizard David Walsh to house his private art collection, the Museum of Old and New Art has been in the headlines since it was launched in Hobart 18 months ago - partly because of the money Walsh has spent on acquisitions, extravagant openings and publicity, but mostly because the museum has captured the imagination of a wider public as well as the attention of the art world.
MONA has a reputation for challenging museum conventions and the latest exhibition takes it to a new level. Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, Theatre of the World spans 4000 years of fine and decorative arts and includes 180 works from the collection of David Walsh and 300 items selected from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery ranging from historical items of furniture to cutting-edge works of contemporary art. Convinced that it is no longer enough to see art in an art historical context, Martin set out to create an experience that is purely about "seeing", enacting a curatorial practice that favours what he calls "visual efficiency". Viewers are invited to use their imagination to find relationships between seemingly disparate objects.
Regardless of whether or not the exhibition points to the future of museum practice and exhibition making, Jean-Hubert Martin's Theatre of the World is beginning to generate the kind of discussion that circulated around his ground-breaking exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidu in 1989.
