";s:4:"text";s:4693:" “Collectors can pretend they collected it because of ‘the infinite irony of Murakami’, but they didn’t. Four experts in science, psychology and language – four men who, in line with Mona’s philosophy of rethinking how we understand art, are outsiders to the art world – have curated their own exhibitions to present their theories of where art comes from.The exhibition comprises 234 objects from 35 countries spanning millennia; some are drawn from the gallery’s collection, others are loans, acquisitions and original commissions. “I own an art gallery and I know almost nothing about art,” he says.
“And there I am, in the editorials in the Mercury, having been a great contributor to the community that I hadn’t revisited since I was able to leave when I was 18.”Mona’s latest exhibition is the gallery’s most ambitious yet, and it deals specifically with a question Walsh has long sought to answer: why do humans make art? Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, Tourism Industry Council Tasmania estimates that the museum contributes more than $100 million a year to the state’s economy. The US evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi brings us art that resembles the natural world – evocative but also grotesque “uncanny valley” sculptures by Patricia Piccinini, a commissioned installation by Brigita Ozolins exploring the resemblance of alphabet letters to the contours of nature – to show us that art is shaped to fit preferences our brains have already developed.The rooms Walsh and I are standing in, though, are the gallerist’s favourite. Now the beneficiary of generous funding from the Tasmanian government for its associated festivals, Dark Mofo and Mona Foma, the museum has been credited with “If I said, ‘I did this for the good of mankind,’ or, ‘I really wanted to help the local community’ – I think I can feel, because I’m concentrating on it, I can feel my blood flow change saying that,” he says, of his motives. “There are tens of thousands of art exhibitions at any given time around the world and all of them are inadvertently based on the premise that art is a cultural phenomenon. Well, that should be obvious by now. “It’s all porn.