As I left the Museum of Old and New Art’s latest exhibition Namedropping, and for many days after, I was troubled by a question I have never asked myself: am I being uncharitable to a millionaire? I think Mona, the boldly iconoclastic museum perched on Hobart’s waterfront, is a good thing in the world. I like that David Walsh, Mona’s creator-owner and a professional gambler, spent so much of his wealth on something that can be enjoyed and whinged about by everyone. I like that it houses solemn, challenging and controversial works, and a machine that poos every day at 2pm. I like that it kicked some stuffy galleries and art critics up the shibboleth.
One of the first things you see as you walk into Namedropping is the bonnet of a black 1977 Holden Torana. The handsome beast is displayed inside a man cave, complete with a nudie calendar and Walsh’s shiny Order of Australia on the wall nearby. According to Mona’s own description, this Torana “makes the point about namedropping and status better than most of the art in this exhibition”. Walsh has previously likened Mona to “a hotted-up Torana” in that it has “acted as a lure for me to bang above my weight”. If I can assure you of anything, you don’t emerge from Namedropping wanting to bang David Walsh.
This is Mona’s largest show in eight years, with about 250 works in 15 rooms exploring “what status is and why it is useful”, a question Mona answers with: because it helps us “attract appropriate mates and allies”. (Back to banging.) Namedropping is frankly enormous; Jarrod Rawlins, one of it’s five co-curators, tells me: “We realised that you could put anything in this show and that seemed really exciting. Six months later, that was really annoying because we had to make decisions.”
Some of these decisions are decipherable and some of the works are remarkable. He Xiangyu’s subversive and brave Tank Project, a lifesize tank made entirely of leather, immediately recalls Tiananmen Square; it was stitched together in secret by Chinese factory workers over two years. Vincent Namatjira’s cheeky self-portrait of himself thundering down a dirt road with Donald Trump. The Wu-Tang Clan album is a completely genius get. There is a Tino Sehgal work that I will probably think about for the rest of my life (to say any more would ruin it).
All of this is bundled up in Mona’s usual comic dissonance, where the sarcophagus of Ankh-pefy-hery rubs shoulders with the mask Heath Ledger wore in Ned Kelly and a nine-year-old Big Mac (disturbingly well preserved by Emma Bugg). There are also what I will call Mona’s requisite controversies: the accused murderers (minimalist Carl Andre’s 144 Tin Square), the confirmed murderers (Mark “Chopper” Read’s self-portrait), and at least one paedophile (Donald Friend’s Codex Bumbooziaticus).
Other works’ significance emerge only in the telling, which Mona always tells very well. The gallery doesn’t do wall panels; instead it has an app, the O, which matches your location in the gallery to nearby works. This allows Mona to do two things: light everything like a Berlin club, and tell you at length about the creation and provenance and gossip behind a work, all of which is very fun. This is how you learn that Danh Vo’s 16:32, 26.05 is the chandelier that hung in the ballroom of Paris’s Hôtel Majestic when the Paris peace accords were signed there in 1973, or the horrifying story behind Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord, which draws on her research into wartime rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
But it is not enough to review an exhibition through the presence of individual items; we must look at the story it tells all together. Mona frames Namedropping as being about essentialism: we feel a jolt when looking at Power Vest 6 by Simon Denny not because it is a puffer jacket, but because it is a puffer jacket made from Margaret Thatcher’s silk scarves. This means there is also some Antiques Roadshow-level fodder on display, like signatures from Marilyn Monroe and the cast of Casablanca, or Charles Darwin’s list of plants in his garden.
Some of the reasoning feels thin. Is it really “namedropping” because a now-famous artist decided to paint a now-famous person and a gallery bought it? Does what we stop to look at in Namedropping say something about us, as Mona posits? The answer to both questions is: well, yes – and?
But when you stop to look at everything, the clearest story that emerges from Namedropping is that Walsh feels conflicted about how he spends his money, or at least wants to be seen doing so. Take his opening question as you walk in: “The money used to construct the exhibition you are about to enter could pay for annual Vitamin A supplements for about 1.8 million kids. Arguably, that would save 360 lives. Is it profligate to spend our money on this indulgence? … Do you feel guilty? Should we?”
In the O, we are told that Walsh had to cancel the Mona Foma festival to fund this exhibition; that Brett Whiteley’s The Naked Studio is only on display because Walsh failed to sell it; that he’s related to Oliver Cromwell; that he knows Ai Weiwei and Ai knows him; that he owns one of Shakespeare’s First Folios; that one time Katy Perry visited Mona and he “didn’t bother to introduce myself”; and that he paid about $386,000, not including fees, for David Bowie’s handwritten lyrics for Starman. Never mind that Starman isn’t even his favourite Bowie song, or that his bidder went $105,000 over his ceiling, or hell, that conservators advised him against displaying it for the duration of Namedropping, which will likely damage it: who cares when, in 50 years, “I don’t think it’ll have any cultural relevance at all”, Walsh says. But he gets to ask another question of us: “Is this piece of paper more useful than, for example, the 376 eye operations in Nepal that that money could have paid for?” Now, that’s an easy one to answer.
For all the curators and questions lobbed at us, Namedropping is about one man and one man only; a man who says he built Mona “to absolve myself from feeling guilty about making money without making a mark”. You may find that interesting. You may just want to see some Beatles signatures. You may find Walsh’s unavoidable presence over the whole thing funny and self-aware, rather than irritatingly self-indulgent.
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.
Why was it that the first time I saw Namedropping, I emerged from Mona’s depths so frustrated and tired? It took going back a second time and staring at that bloody Torana to figure it out. The whole exhibition feels defensive, laden with the tension that comes just before a fight. I couldn’t say if Walsh should feel guilty about how he spends his money or not – art is not plunder, nor is money spent on art squandered – but he’s certainly asked us in a very expensive way. There’s another name for this exhibition: Peacocking.
Namedropping runs until 21 April 2025. Sian Cain travelled as a guest of Mona.
