ZiZi the Affectionate Couch is now in the collection of the Museum of Old and New Art that opened in Hobart last week. This collection of mind blowing and culture expanding works will keep you coming back for more. Just when you think you’ve seen it all there is another room full of delightful ideas, punchy controversy and suprising perspectives. Unfettered by sponsors, politics and curatorial imperatives, the private collector, David Walsh, shows Dr. Nitche’s Euthanasia Machine (presented as My Beautiful Chair in collaboration with Greg Taylor) that is too controversial for any other museum in Australia to show, while just down the hall is Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary with elephant dung that was part of an exhibition cancelled by the National Gallery of Australia. It is fantastic to find ZiZi providing emotional support among such notorious and illustrious company.

The works are not organised by  themes and there are no distracting labels on the walls – instead there is an interactive O guide that monitors your path through the galleries, allowing you to retrieve multimedia information about works at will, and to retrieve this information from a website after your visit.

Try the interactive 3D post-visit guide which shows information about the works along the pathway I took through the gallerie by logging into the MONA O site as “umwebejo@gmail.com”.

Here is an amusing wrap up of the opening night extravaganza from the Hobart Mercury newspaper – MONA’s art of shock.

In the end MONA is shocking because it shows the potential for art to  change the way people think, and to make a contribution to the debate on contemporary issues in society.