![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/172f473d3341681249f2ee3edaa160395e13debb-737x492.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nFor the past few years, visitors who arrived at Hobart\u2019s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) by car were greeted by a construction sign that read \u201cYep, David\u2019s building something new\u2026 at this point we\u2019ve given up trying to stop him\u201d.<\/p>\n
Designed to keep people out of harm\u2019s way during construction of the museum\u2019s latest extension, the signage also suggested that David Walsh, the multi-millionaire professional gambler behind Australia\u2019s largest privately owned museum, may not be able to control his art obsession.<\/p>\n
A new wing called Phrontisterion, the largest construction project in Mona\u2019s 15-year history, opens this weekend. Breaking new ground presented an opportunity to reflect on the original motives behind the museum\u2014at least one of which was to \u201cactively re-educate people about how to use a museum\u201d, Walsh tells The Art Newspaper. At the time there was a \u201cvery significant chance that no one cared\u201d if he failed, he says.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Joshua Yeldham\u2019s installation Surrender Room (detail, 2025-26) is a new\u00a0addition to the museum<\/p>\n
Photo: Mona\/Jesse Hunniford, courtesy of the artist and Mona<\/p>\n
But with its eclectic mix of contemporary art, antiquities and an ever-increasing list of permanent installations from the likes of James Turrell, Alfredo Jaar and Anselm Kiefer, Mona has prevailed against its critics, becoming a must-visit global art destination over the past 15 years. On its website, Mona invites visitors to \u201cCome along, catch the ferry, drink wine, eat oysters. Talk crap about the art.\u201d And many artists and curators have done that. \u201cThe art community is on the whole fairly supportive of Mona,\u201d Walsh says. \u201cSo I get celebrity treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n
With an estimated price tag of A$100m ($70m), Phrontisterion cost significantly more than the A$75m Walsh stumped up for the original museum, which is largely underground. It has increased Mona\u2019s display space from 8,440 sq. m to roughly 12,640 sq. m.<\/p>\n
Cartography and contemporary art<\/p>\n
In 2023 Walsh revealed that the extension would include his \u201cdream library\u201d as well as works by Kiefer, the 17th-century cartographer Willem Blaeu, and the contemporary French-Swiss artist Julian Charri\u00e8re. That list now includes Matthew Barney, Joshua Yeldham, Lucas Grogan, Rachel Marks and Ben Jakober, whose work is on show in the redeveloped library space.<\/p>\n
The new wing also houses Charri\u00e8re\u2019s Breathe, a new permanent installation that gives visitors the chance to inhale oxygen molecules previously trapped inside pieces of iron ore that formed 2.4 billion years ago during the Great Oxidation Event. According to Walsh, Australia is one of the only places Breathe could be realised, as \u201canywhere else you\u2019d have to import rocks\u201d. Located adjacent to the new wing, on the edge of the River Derwent, is In Absence (2019), a collaboration between the Kokatha\/Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce and the architecture studio Edition Office. The design of this 9m-high timber pavilion, adorned with more than 1,400 hand-blown glass daisy yams, was inspired by the eel traps used for thousands of years by many of the first peoples of South-Eastern Australia.<\/p>\n
Phrontisterion also encompasses Elektra (2025), an inverted concrete pyramid designed by Kiefer that went on display last December, built to resemble the artist\u2019s outdoor studio near Barjac in southern France. Walsh says he has visited the studio \u201cmany times\u201d and each time was \u201cmesmerised, thrilled, excited, stupefied\u201d by the scale of it. \u201cIt\u2019s like one man building the Great Pyramids,\u201d he says. Walsh\u2019s deep affection for Kiefer\u2019s structures at Barjac resulted in Mona\u2019s international curator, Geneva-based Olivier Varenne, approaching Kiefer with a \u201cspeculative idea\u201d to reconstruct one in Hobart, \u201cnot really expecting it to come to anything\u201d, Walsh says. But it did.<\/p>\n
A place of deep thinking<\/p>\n
Elektra is a \u201crestrictive artwork\u201d, Walsh says. \u201cIt leaves a lot of negative space.\u201d While the negative space at Barjac is in the ground, at Mona it provided Walsh with \u201ca good place to build a library\u201d.<\/p>\n
In Ancient Greece the playwright Aristophanes employed the word phrontisterion, which refers to a place of deep thinking or meditation, to take a swipe at the popularity of Socrates\u2019 open-air philosophical debates. In the context of Mona, phrontisterion refers to the centrepiece of the new wing, Mona\u2019s new library.<\/p>\n
Mona is all about the \u201cefficient use of space\u201d, Walsh says. When it first opened it was \u201can A$75m museum with the floor space of museums that cost hundreds of millions of dollars\u201d. But that economy of space did not apply to the library, which had \u201csuper fancy elegant walls\u201d that meant the books sat on bookshelves in the centre of the room, Walsh says. I made \u201cno attempt to raise [the library] to the level of the objects that were contained within Mona\u201d, he says. It is a decision he has always regretted.<\/p>\n
Death of Dewey<\/p>\n
The new library boasts over 50,000 books, maps and documents housed in custom-built cabinetry and underpinned by a state-of-the-art proprietary cataloguing technology that Walsh hopes will one day end the stranglehold the Dewey Decimal System has over the world\u2019s libraries. With the Dewey Decimal System a \u201cbook has to be in a single place always\u201d, Walsh says. With new assisted technology, Mona\u2019s librarians can identify books \u201cimmediately, accurately\u201d and \u201cdo cataloging far cheaper, aesthetically and make associations between books far more apparent\u201d.<\/p>\n
But perhaps most pleasing to Walsh is the fact that the library will showcase the foundational philosophy of Mona, and the \u201cconceptual space\u201d the museum inhabits, much of which is concerned with exploring the biological and evolutionary drivers behind why humans create and appreciate art. Walsh says he is interested in \u201cthe motives of artists rather than the art itself\u201d.<\/p>\n
According to Walsh, the sort of money he spent on Mona could have bought him \u201ca jet and an island or a big boat or those things that some really rich people do\u201d. But instead he went all-in on art\u2014and what did he get? Buying \u201celite art is targeted status acquisition\u201d, he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the past few years, visitors who arrived at Hobart\u2019s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":717212,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[144640,228,226,227,309002,229,88,282186,309001,6049],"class_list":["post-717211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-anselm-kiefer","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-david-walsh","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-museum-expansions","tag-museum-of-old-and-new-art","tag-museums"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=717211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/717211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/717212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=717211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=717211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=717211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}